Jharkhand Tribal Livelihoods Crisis: Climate Change & Deforestation Impacting Indigenous Communities

Ranchi: Erratic climate change and widespread deforestation are fracturing the delicate relationship between Jharkhand’s tribal communities and the environment, triggering a severe livelihood and dietary crisis. Experts warn that indigenous populations, who depend entirely on nature, are bearing the heaviest burden of this ecological breakdown.

Professor S N Munda, former vice-chancellor of Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee University, highlighted the loss of traditional conservation wisdom. “For generations, tribal elders preserved the ecosystem without formal scientific training, relying purely on lived experience to protect the forests. Their traditional practices were inherently sustainable,” Munda said.

“Today, this ancestral wisdom is rapidly being forgotten, a crisis worsened by an education system that has failed to integrate tribal ecological, social, and economic knowledge into the syllabus for younger generations,” he added.

Compounding this crisis is an increasingly hostile weather pattern. Local tribal weather forecaster Gajendra Oraon, who specialises in predicting rainfall using traditional rice grain readings, warned of rainfall shortage this year. “The tribals rely heavily on weather pattern for their daily lives, be it farming or eating. The erratic weather nowadays has hampered that,” Oraon said.

Bhuwneshwar Oraon, a local teacher and farmer said, “Earthworms are natural fertilisers, crabs help in identifying and preserving water sources, snails are pest eaters in farms and bees help in pollination. With the climate change and rapidly changing weather pattern, there is a reduction in population of these beings having a direct negative impact on the farming.”