Rural Community Organising Deepa: Working in Hakki Pikki Tribal Colony and the surrounding villages

· A Parable on Progress

· The Hakki Pikki and Iruliga Adivasi Sangha: Regenerating Roots and  Reclaiming an Identity

· Reweaving Crafts into Sustainable Livelihoods

· Women’s Collectives

· Networking with groups in the district: Towards Mahila Nyaya Panchayats

A Parable on Progress

A free spirited nomadic community who have migrated over the past century from Gujarat, the Hakki Pikki’s, also called Shikaris or the hunters, used to traditionally make a living through hunting and trapping birds in the forest and selling them along with lucky charms and trinkets in the villages and towns that they passed through. A people who learnt to survive the changing times in any part of the world with their own strength and resilient charm.

The world was after all their home.

The Iruligas also called Irulas or the people of the night , on the other hand, had little contact with the outside world having lived their lives and evolved their livelihoods from within the forest. A people whose vast knowledge resides in the deepest secrets of the forest and its ways.

The forest was after all their home.

The Hakki Pikki Colony: The Story of a People Displaced

A quixotic act of fate aided by a directive of the government brought together the ways of the world and the forest in Hakki Pikki Colony that that lies about 25 kms away from the city of Bangalore on the fringes of the Bannerghatta National Park. In the early sixties as part of it’s attempts to rehabilitate tribals and bring them into the mainstream of development, the government uprooted families of the two disparate tribes and brought them together in this little settlement that has grown over the past decades into a vibrant village community.

Houses were built and a substantial amount of money was spent by the Government to implement many schemes that sought to bring them into the mainstream of development. An effort that bore little fruit since all those livelihood options offered went against the grain of their own survival systems that depended on foraging and hunting in the forest; activities that the mainstream criminalised on the one hand but also exploited on the other. 

Theirs was therefore a story of displacement from traditional ways of life and livelihoods without being offered any sustainable alternatives rooted in their inherent skills and wisdoms. This process of devaluation and destruction of their life systems with no viable alternatives only succeeded in breeding a hopeless sense of dependency apart from crippling impoverishment and further marginalisation

What has been happening in the Hakki Pikki tribal colony, is perhaps a microcosm of the situation in almost all rural and tribal communities in the era of globalisation and progress.

Our intervention therefore began where the state intervention stopped i.e. their refusal to fit into mainstream society. A resistance we sought to understand, interact with and strengthen even while helping to enhance their livelihood options in a world that has become hostile to 
them.

The objectives therefore for our work in Hakki Pikki and the villages around the Bannerghatta National Park, guided by this vision therefore revolve around facilitating the following:

· Renewal of the community based justice systems that are able to take in new realities while being based on a more organic and rooted sense of justice.

· A more active participation of all sections of people in community affairs, particularly the marginalised and the poor, both within the village as also vis a vis the decisions that are being taken at the panchayat and zilla parishad level with relation to development programmes for the village concerned.

· Increased participation of women in the decision making processes of the community as also those of ensuring their own survival and security needs. Simultaneously, an increased sensitivity within the whole community to the lives, realities and needs of women who are becoming vulnerable to newer forms of violence and discrimination.

· A greater public and social affirmation and acceptance of women’s participation in decisions related to the community as well as her own personal life as also that of community structures of justice.

· Increased number of effectively functioning organisations like the Hakki Pikki and Iruliga Tribal Society and the women’s self help groups that are being set up in the different communities and those we will be networking and working with on issues related to social justice including violence against women.

· A greater accountability, responsiveness and sensitivity on the part of state structures like the police, revenue departments and panchayats to the needs and realities of the poor, the marginalised, the women.
· Enhancing livelihood options through helping to build on locally available resources, inherent skills and techniques while resisting being exploited and used by the dominant market economy.

Our Involvements

In the present phase our focus is more on initiating and strengthening organisations that we have helped evolve from within the community that will address all the issues that we have been working with.

a. The Hakki Pikki and Iruliga Adivasi Sangha: Regenerating Roots and Reclaiming an Identity

The Hakki Pikki and Iruliga Adivasi Sangha, grew out the need from within the tribal community to create structures of self governance that will also generate sustainable livelihood options. It came into formal existence in 2002 with the support of SIEDS – Deepa and Vimochana and since then has become the focal point for many of the activities in the community that include among others:

- asserting absolute rights over the land that they are living on and entitled to

- regeneration of traditional skills and crafts and enhancing sustainable livelihood options

- negotiating for and facilitating through the local panchayat various civic work like roads, housing, electricity, drainage etc

- strengthening and supporting a collective consciousness that challenges state structures and institutions to be more responsive to their needs and their rights vis a vis building vibrant and sustainable local communities.

- working with and reaffirming community based norms and institutions of justice and conflict resolution even while challenging them in instances when hierarchies like that of gender are used to perpetuate injustice against the more vulnerable within the community.

It also is the umbrella organisation for several women’s self help groups that have come into being not only for the purposes of collectively saving and lending out money at low interest rates to its members but also for creating shared spaces in which women collectively address their personal/domestic problems as also public issues related to the community and the larger society.

b. Reweaving Crafts into Sustainable Livelihoods

The craft common to both the tribes is that of weaving. While the Iruligas are skilled at working with bamboo that they weave into baskets that are used for carrying mud, vegetables etc the Hakki Pikkis have worked with different kinds of natural fibres for weaving very fine bird trapping nets and sleeping mats. With bamboo becoming part of forest property and virtually inaccessible to the tribals and bird hunting being criminalised, eking out a livelihood with these skills is becoming more difficult and unviable. 

Moreover, natural products that were nurtured in and sustained by local markets have been violently displaced by industrially processed, mass produced, ecologically disastrous material like plastic. The urbancentric and industrially biased economic system has ensured that it is the latter that has become more common and affordable in the rural and poorer markets. 

As part of its attempts to regenerate traditional craft and skills and make them more viable both in the local rural and larger urban markets, the Sangha has begun to explore the possibility of using banana and other natural fibres like corn and Kathale to weave bags and other utilitarian and aesthetic products like mobile covers, table mats, coasters etc. The purpose is threefold:

- supplement and then when possible replace the use of plastic with natural fibre as the base material for the products that they create

- introduce their skills and creativity into markets other than the local ones that they are surviving from, such that they are able to negotiate with and enter into new commercial spaces on their own terms and in their own idiom

- reintroduce natural fibres into local markets through creating
suitable, needed and affordable products

Regeneration of crafts therefore becomes inseparable from recreating more sustainable livelihoods for creative, vibrant and self sustaining rural and tribal communities.

c. Women’s Collectives

Within Hakki Pikki Colony as also many of the villages around we have also initiated several women’s self help groups based on their expressed need to collectively save their money and enhance their livelihood options. Over a period of time, they are also becoming a forum and a shared space for women to collectively address their personal/domestic problems as also public issues related to the community and larger society. 

Weekly meetings are held when the saving amount is collected, problems and issues within the group and community are discussed and collective action taken in specific instances- as for instance with cases related to wife beating or alcohol abuse. These actions would be planned not as individual reactions but after there is some amount of reflection and analyses of the larger dimensions of the issue. While each individual group meets every week within the village we have also been holding joint meetings of all the groups every month - each time in a different village where the local group hosts all the others. At these meetings we usually have somebody coming from outside to initiate discussions on issues of common concern.

d. Networking with groups in the district: Towards Mahila Nyaya Panchayats

Working as we do with issues related to violence against women and violence in larger society through Vimochana and CIEDS, we have also been extending our concerns to the larger taluk of Anekal through the existing network of women’s groups with whom we have been working on common programmes. As for instance over the past two years we have had common programmes for International Women’s Day on issues such as Women’s Vision for a New Politics, and New Forms of Justice for Women. Through following up these public meetings with a series of workshops we hope to be working towards the setting up a network of mahila panchayats at the village level that could intervene on issues related to violence against women and other related issues. [Link with Vimochana]

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