Birhor Community Arki, Khunti

Birhor community is one of eight Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) identified in Jharkhand.  Birhor is derived from the words Bir meaning Jungle and hor meaning man thus it means the man living in Jungle or people of Jungle. There are a total of 18 families of Birhor community residing in Telangadi and Birhor colony of Arki block in Khunti district. The total population of the community is 61 in Birhore Colony.

The Birhors do not practice any form of agriculture and are entirely dependent upon the collection of forest products for their living. They are mostly food collectors and hunters. These households have been provided with houses under the Birsa Awas scheme. Some houses are single room house while most have two rooms. One family among the community has a large house with 5 rooms, which was constructed by additional money added by the family, whose one child woks as a cook in some other farther district.

The community has been provided with solar water pump for water supply. All the houses have one tap outside their respective houses for drinking water. The houses got connected to electricity grid in January 2019 and have electricity supply for around 16 to 20 hours. Apart from the grid electricity, there are 4 solar street lights in the community  and each households have been provided with solar lamps. Individual households were distributed with Solar Lamp as well.

All the households are engaged as agricultural labourers. They grow mainly paddy as a crop. The wage rate for agricultural labourers ranges from Rs. 110 to Rs. 120/-. Though they have been provided with 12 acres of land, but they haven’t started doing any sort of farming there for they have not been involved in agricultural activities from a long time. Recently, during the second visit of fellows to see the implementation of various initiative by district administration, the idea is now to provide proper irrigation facility and easy to use farm equipment (plough, seed, fertilizer etc.) for them to start using their land for agriculture purposes.

The community does rope making as their primary job. It is their traditional practice from generations. They make ropes from plastic sacks and trunk of Chihod trees. Majorly they make ropes from plastic sacks. They get the sacks at Rs. 3 per bag from the market in Tamad. They can make a maximum of 3 ropes in a day. They sell the ropes in Bundu and Tamad bazzer  for  Rs. 20/rope, one rope is made out of 3 sacks. On unit economic analysis it was found that one person on an average generates an income of Rs. 24 per day by rope making. Since the Households  are engaged in a traditional practice of rope making, energy intervention in more efficient and scalable rope has been done by providing solar rope making machines to increase the productivity and enhance the profitability of the households. This is keeping their existing art of making varied varieties of ropes existing parallel to machine made ropes.

Apart from agricultural labour and rope making, the female of the community get a pension of Rs. 1000/month from the govt. which helps them for running out their daily chores. All the community has access to Aadhar, ration card and voted in this general election and gets 100 days of employment through NREGA. An Active women who studied till class 8 th and the one who had the opportunity to do the maximum schooling, runs evening tuitions with a lot of learning materials with around 12 children of the community. District Administration has decided to declare the area as another Poshan Kshetra and to open one more AWC (Anganwadi Centre) for better reach of various benefits of the government among this PVTG community.