A systematic review of population health interventions and Scheduled Tribes in India

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Despite India's recent economic growth, health and human development indicators of Scheduled Tribes (ST) or <it>Adivasi </it>(India's indigenous populations) lag behind national averages. The aim of this review was to identify the public health interventions or components of these interventions that are effective in reducing morbidity or mortality rates and reducing risks of ill health among ST populations in India, in order to inform policy and to identify important research gaps.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We systematically searched and assessed peer-reviewed literature on evaluations or intervention studies of a population health intervention undertaken with an ST population or in a tribal area, with a population health outcome(s), and involving primary data collection.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The evidence compiled in this review revealed three issues that promote effective public health interventions with STs: (1) to develop and implement interventions that are low-cost, give rapid results and can be easily administered, (2): a multi-pronged approach, and (3): involve ST populations in the intervention.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>While there is a growing body of knowledge on the health needs of STs, there is a paucity of data on how we can address these needs. We provide suggestions on how to undertake future population health intervention research with ST populations and offer priority research avenues that will help to address our knowledge gap in this area.</p

Making subaltern shikaris: histories of the hunted in colonial central India

Academic histories of hunting or shikar in India have almost entirely focused on the sports hunting of British colonists and Indian royalty. This article attempts to balance this elite bias by focusing on the meaning of shikar in the construction of the Gond ‘tribal’ identity in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial central India. Coining the term ‘subaltern shikaris’ to refer to the class of poor, rural hunters, typically ignored in this historiography, the article explores how the British managed to use hunting as a means of state penetration into central India’s forest interior, where they came to regard their Gond forest-dwelling subjects as essentially and eternally primitive hunting tribes. Subaltern shikaris were employed by elite sportsmen and were also paid to hunt in the colonial regime’s vermin eradication programme, which targeted tigers, wolves, bears and other species identified by the state as ‘dangerous beasts’. When offered economic incentives, forest dwellers usually willingly participated in new modes of hunting, even as impact on wildlife rapidly accelerated and became unsustainable. Yet as non-indigenous approaches to nature became normative, there was sometimes also resistance from Gond communities. As overkill accelerated, this led to exclusion of local peoples from natural resources, to their increasing incorporation into dominant political and economic systems, and to the eventual collapse of hunting as a livelihood. All of this raises the question: To what extent were subaltern subjects, like wildlife, ‘the hunted’ in colonial India