Country: Bihar, India
Group: Munda
Date: October 31, 2023
Team: Nicole Cavallin (lead), Ariana Jackson, Cheyenne Barron, Isabelle Kolnacki
Content Warnings: displacement, discrimination
Approximate Time Period: 1870 – 2020
The Munda people are an Austroasiatic-speaking ethnic group of the Indian subcontinent. They speak Mundari as their native language. The Munda people are mainly concentrated in the South and East Chotanagpur Plateau region of Jharkhand,Odisha and West Bengal (Wikipedia, 2023). While their origin story is unclear, it is clear that they settled in the forest-dense area of Chota Nagpur and were primarily displaced by the government.
The Chota Nagpur region saw a rapid increase in population after 1872. While the region prospered due to industrialization and urbanization, the tribal groups suffered considerably, mainly because of deforestation, land alienation, unemployment and indebtedness. They were recruited by their non-tribal employers. They migrated to the tea gardens of Assam where contractors and planters exploited and discriminated against them. As a result of non-tribal incursion in the region, the tribes were gradually outnumbered by outsiders. This adversely affected the tribal economy as well as their social and political order (Bandyopadhyay, 1999).
Mundas continue to be victims of development projects and land alienation. The Jharkhand government has signed over 42 Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs) with investors including Mittal Steel, Tata Steel, and Jindal Steel and Power Company Limited since Jharkhand became a state in 2000. These projects would require approximately 47,445 acres of land in the mineral-rich Kolhan Region, which could affect about 10,000 families and cause deforestation of 5,715 square kilometers of land. A study by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), a human rights organization, shows that over 740,000 members of tribal groups, including Mundas, were displaced in Jharkhand by different projects between 1950 and 1990. Only 184,500 were rehabilitated and the remaining 562,600—-over two-thirds of the displaced—have been left to fend for themselves. According to the report, industries had displaced 260,000 tribals, including Mundas, while different animal sanctuaries had forced about 500,000 tribals to leave their homes (Encyclopedia.Com, n.d.). The Munda’s have continued to work, “as laborers with little or no knowledge of economics. They have been exploited by employees, cheated by society members, lost their land, and have resorted to using credit unions charging high interest” (Wikipedia, 2023).
Data quality for this case was rated a 3/3 due to the availability of reliable, peer-reviewed sources.
Sources
- Bandyopadhyay, M. (1999). Demographic consequences of non-tribal incursion in Chotanagpur region during colonial period (1850-1950). Social Change. https://doi.org/10.1177/004908579902900403
- Huda, M. S. (2021). The Mundas: an ethnic community in the south-west coastal region of Bangladesh (Buno/kuli/Sarna/Horoko, Indigenous people during the British period coming from Ranchi). https://www.hilarispublisher.com/open-access/the-mundas-an-ethnic-community-in-the-southwest-coastal-region-of-bangladesh-bunokulisarnahoroko-indigenous-people-durin.pdf
- Encyclopedia.com. (n.d.). Mundas | Retrieved October 23, 2023, from https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/mundas
- Wikipedia (2023). Munda people. In https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Munda_people&oldid=1177752274