Adivasis in Chhattisgarh use technology to reclaim maps and forest rights

In the early 2000s, a group of foresters walked into the village of Nagesh in Gariaband district, Chhattisgarh, carrying a set of maps. They conducted a mini-survey and then proceeded to plant munaras, or posts, throughout the village. Some posts were planted in vacant spaces shared by two or more households of the Bhunjiyas – a community categorised as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group in Chhattisgarh, owing to their declining population, high poverty rates, and fading culture.

"When we asked the foresters why they were doing the same, they simply told us that they were trying to decipher the real border of the forests," Arjun Singh Naik, a local leader and former village head, or sarpanch, told me. The households that fell on the 'wrong' side of the border were warned of eviction. Time and again, members of these households have had to travel to the district headquarters, nearly two hours away by foot, to plead their case with forest officials. There, a forester invariably rolled out a map, pointed to a thin line and justified the existence of the forest in a way that made the Bhunjiya presence feel like an accident or mistake. The lines on the map were made to appear as acts of god and not the government. Perhaps this is why the radical geographer John Brian Harley contended that maps "exert a social influence through their omissions, as much as by the features they depict and emphasise."