Tribal Turmoil

Despite government's renewed outreach, tribals in the Andhra-Telangana region continue to lose their homelands and their grip over their rights

- Anisha Reddy

EARLIER this month, more than a dozen tribal families living in the Meduvai village in Andhra Pradesh’s Bhadrachalam district, had a rude awakening in the dead of night. Andhra Police (AP) and state administrative officials pulled tribal women like Lakshmi, who was in her late 40s, by their hair from their homes and warned them to leave their ancestral lands before sunrise. The government machinery alleged that the tribals were occupying the territory ‘illegally’.

“What was our crime? Sleeping peacefully at home?” asks Lakshmi, who hails from the Konda Reddi tribes, which have generational ties to Meduvai village and nearby areas. Her eyes are red from anger and fatigue. “I looked straight into the eyes of the officials wielding guns and said I will not leave my land,” she says. Despite her courage in the face of adversity, Lakshmi, along with 15 families from the same tribe, were vacated from their ancestral lands on that February night. “You belong in the jungles. You should go back there,” they were told by the officials who orchestrated the government’s drive to vacate tribals living in the area.

Lakshmi now works as a maid in an upper middle-class household in Bhadrachalam. The tall building she works in now, looms over her new home—a thatched hut—which she moved into after being displaced by a multi-crore irrigation project. Lakshmi had shut her eyes for what seemed like a minute, while her home was razed by officials right in front of her. She did not see the walls crumbling, but the sounds of demolition continue to echo in her ears.