As climate change erodes livelihoods, Jharkhand’s Parhaiya Adivasis migrate to toil in brick kilns

Sauri Parheen’s day starts at 4 am. Her house is in one among the many hamlets scattered across the lush, undulating hillocks and jungles of the Chotanagpur plateau. “When I worked in the brick kiln, I had to wake up at 3 am. Now that I am home, I comfortably wake up at 4 am, sit by the fire, and then start my daily chores,” she says.

Sauri Parheen is among the 25,585 Parhaiyas (as per the 2011 census) in India, located primarily in Palamu and Latehar districts of Jharkhand. Parhaiyas are categorised as a “particularly vulnerable tribal group”.

Identified by the Dhebar Commission in 1973, particularly vulnerable tribal groups constitute one of the most vulnerable tribal communities in India with low levels of literacy, declining population, pre-agricultural level of technology and economic backwardness.

Living deep inside India’s forests and traditionally subsisting on shifting cultivation and hunting-gathering, these communities have gradually lost their traditional source of livelihood as a result of environment degradation, wildlife and forest policy, encroachment of habitats and a persistent denial of land rights, according to this 2021 study of eight particularly vulnerable tribal groups of Odisha and Jharkhand.

This lack of livelihood has led to about 73% of the households in two blocks of Latehar to migrate for work,...

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