Tribal Community Development and Empowerment Project

Tribal Community Development and Empowerment Project

Place: Gangasagar Island, under Gangasagar Gram Panchayat

Sagar Block , P.S. Sagar

Comprising of 350 Santhali and fisher man families (about 1150 population) reside in Gangasagar Gram Panchayet in Sagar Island under South 24 parganas. They are similar to Lodha tribe. They have migrated from Medinipur, Jhargram district about 70 years back. They are Santhali and fisherman Community. They are solely dependent on natural resources forests and rivers for their survival. Their main livelihood is mostly migration for better earning, fishing in the river, hunting small animals, birds, fish, crabs even turtles, collecting woods and honey. Few families are involved in begging at temple area of Kapil Muni. The children also go to catch fish in the river along with their families, younger ones are left alone. They continue nomadic life for better earning, thus the children are deprived of schooling and other opportunities to grow in a healthy environment. They are not habituated with cultivation because they do not have lands of their own. They have not got any legal right of possession for the land as they have migrated from other places. Many of them lack the legal documents such as Ration Cards, Voter I Cards, and any subsidy or job facility from Panchayat level due to illiteracy and unawareness. They were not provided with any alternative livelihood options and so were bound to start some sort of criminal activities to survive though basically they were not criminals but tragedy is that they are still marked as ‘criminal tribes’ alike Lodha and often utilized so by the people with vested interest exploiting them in most of the cases. They are rejected by the general cast of the locality incorporating even un-touchability. They are battling with life to survive every day.
KMWSC has started the intervention with this community from January 2023 opening 2 learning centres in 2 locations of Tribal community and fishermen community with 80 children. KMWSC aims to bring holistic development of this community in the years to come.