The tale of tribal loss Premium

of Anakapalli districtKhond women in Kothaveedhi village, AP, welcome guests by washing their feet & hands. They face eviction threat & are questioning how their names were omitted from records. CM Jagan has extended welfare schemes to PVTGs. Tribals are tenant farmers & lack documents, but officials are working out a model to benefit them.

To welcome someone who is not a part of their tribe, the Khond women in Kothaveedhi village, in Cheedikada mandal of Anakapalli district in Andhra Pradesh, wash their feet and hands. G. Chilakamma, 60, explains, “This has been our tradition ever since I can remember, ever since we came here and started growing fruit trees.”

Sitting under a canopy of green, drinking sweet tender-coconut water, eating freshly cut papaya and guava ripened on their trees, it’s easy to leave the sense-numbing noise of the city behind. Except, the city is catching up with the Khonds, a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG), who claim they have inhabited this village for the last 40 years or so.

The 10 families who had migrated to this village from G. Madugula mandal today face the threat of eviction. “We find that our names have been removed from the digitised land records and this practically makes us homeless people, despite being the tillers of this 65 cents of land (a little less than an acre),” says Vanthala Nageswara Rao, who was the first to come here with his wife, Vanthala Kumari, and friend Gemmili Balaraju, Chilakamma’s husband. Here, they bore children and grandchildren.

“I moved here when I was barely 13 years old. I gave birth here, and now I have grandchildren. They go to school every day, trekking 3 km,” says Vanthala Kumari.

They had never known anyone as owners of this pristine land before, they say, and there is no tenancy agreement between them and any private party.

Despite the uncertain future, Chilakamma smiles, her sun-burnt face crinkling up, as she wipes her guests’ feet with her saree that she wears like a sarong, knotted at the neck. An objection is treated as an insult. Her heavy gold nose stud is a symbol of being married.

Several villages in the mandals of Devarapalli, Cheedikada, V. Madugula, Ravikamatam, Rolugunta, and Golugonda in Anakapalli districts where tribal people live, face similar problems of being alienated from land they have lived on.