Contested food, conflicting policies: health and development in tribal communities in India

Abstract

This paper explores the deep connections between experiences of health and changes in the local ecology, farming, and food consumption practices among tribal people in Odisha, a state in India. The role of governmental and market actors in initiating and reinforcing these changes is analysed in a political ecology framework using a relational understanding of ‘place’. It allows us to think of changing health outcomes and perceptions in communities as they simultaneously experience changes in access to forest resources and farming practices, and consequent dietary changes. Our paper suggests that with the creation of new social and power relations and ecological materialities, nutritional insecurities are produced or sustained, even as access to formal healthcare improves. We show how the plethora of development policies often work against each other and accentuate health vulnerabilities, even as they seek to create incomes and ensure food availability.

Keywords:

• Political ecology
• place
• malnutrition
• development
• tribal
• India

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their constructive feedback. We are grateful to the participants of the research, who cannot be named to protect their identities, for sharing their experiences, knowledge and time. An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the Political Ecology conference in 2018, where it received feedback that helped in developing the later versions of the paper. This paper is part of the first author’s doctoral research, conducted under the guidance of Rajesh Bhattacharya. The authors are thankful to Priyanshu Gupta, Sattwick Dey Biswas, Anuj Goyal, and Suvendu Naskar for their comments and suggestions on the earlier versions of the paper. This work is dedicated to the late Debjeet Sarangi and the late Subham Sharma whose contributions were instrumental in the early stages of fieldwork and writing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 An anganwadi worker is a village-level health service provider appointed by the government as part of the ICDS, the flagship programme of the Government of India since 1975 to combat child malnutrition and rural child care.

2 ‘Functionings’ have been defined by Amartya Sen as a set of ‘doings and beings’ that constitutes human ‘capabilities’. This may include many things – ‘elementary functionings as escaping morbidity and mortality, being adequately nourished, undertaking usual movements etc., to many complex functionings such as achieving self-respect, taking part in the life of the community and appearing in public without shame’ (Sen 1990,  320).

3 The mid-day meal scheme is a school meal programme run by Government of India since 1995 to improve the nutritional level of school-going children and the school enrolment level.

Additional information

Funding

The fieldwork for this research was supported by a doctoral fellowship from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

Notes on contributors

Vandana

Vandana is currently working as Assistant Professor at O. P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat. She completed her PhD in public policy and management from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, following around three years of experience as a development professional. Her current research works lie in the intersection of fields of study such as political ecology, sustainable development with a focus on the food system, and aspects related to development discourse and post-growth thinking in India. Her doctoral dissertation aims to analyse the conflicts in policy priorities across multiple government departments (namely, forest, agriculture and food/nutrition), and among various actors (state, market and NGOs) in the backdrop of the perpetual problem of malnutrition in India.

Rajesh Bhattacharya

Rajesh Bhattacharya is Associate Professor in the Public Policy and Management Group at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. His research is grounded in the political economy approach, and he has previously published on informal economy, property rights, migration, education, urban exclusion, welfare and voting, etc., as well as on management and economics in India, postcolonial thought and development. His recent publications include the book Urban Housing, Livelihoods and Environmental Challenges in Emerging Economies (edited with Annapurna Shaw and published by Orient Blackswan in 2021). His articles have appeared in the International Review of Applied Economics, Review of Radical Political Economics, Journal of South Asian Development, International Journal of Productivity and Performance, Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, etc.