Samvaad 2025: A Conclave of Voices
A day and a half with India's tribal communities
She introduced herself as a housewife with two children. When the kids grew up, she said, she started making traditional sarees and kurtis in her free time. The clothes she designed and crafted drew attention from people in her town in Odisha. Seeing the demand, she opened a small shop. More people came. After some years she created a website, and now she gets orders from all over India. It feels good, she said.
I was sitting at the edge of a tent set in a clearing within the Jamshedpur nature trail, listening to women and men share origin stories of their art and craft ventures. The session was a part of Samvaad 2025, a “conclave” that brought together over 2500 tribals from 150+ tribes across India. Samvaad began in 2014, launched by the Tata Steel Foundation (TSF) as a platform for India’s tribal communities to come together in dialogue, celebrate tribal culture and share knowledge. I’d been invited by TSF in place of my organisation’s CEO Krishna, who was unable to attend this year.
In the tent, others stood up to share their origin stories. A social enterprise that designs clothing around adivasi narratives; handicrafts created only for a specific tribal ritual; a mushroom farming initiative that began with a training and turned into a pan-India enterprise. Woven into these stories were challenges they faced along the way. “Girls don’t start businesses” the parents of the mushroom-farming entrepreneur told her. And there were questions too: How to take our sheep-wool product to a broader market?
Policies, schemes, state departments, etc were one side of the story; what became evident here was the glue needed at the village level (“the last mile”) to make all of it work together towards social development. Without these local actors, achieving “scale” through those policies and schemes would perhaps remain a theory.
What followed was a presentation, by an invited guest, on “Pricing and Costing” of such products created by tribal communities. Fair pricing, key pricing concepts, common pricing mistakes, understanding cost components – these subjects were covered first in English, then translated into Hindi. And all this came under the morning’s theme for this venue: Made for the Market.
The setting amidst trees, with a mild sun gently warming our backs, seemed just right for such an exchange of histories, narratives, and strategies. By contrast, the digital spaces we often use for learning and exchanges seemed to me, at that moment, pale and uninspiring.
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Later that first morning I visited the Tribal Cultural Center, where small groups of 10 to 15 “Samvaad fellows” were huddled together sharing experiences. In one group discussion I listened to, a woman spoke about a migration issue they faced in a town in Jharkhand. Many locals were leaving for jobs elsewhere. The fellows first identified the causes: low awareness of local jobs available via MGNREGA, and very few people with “Job cards”. The fellows worked with the local mukhiya to create awareness about MGNREGA, drove the creation of three hundred job cards, and increased the number of eligible government schemes from three to twenty. And this reversed the migration trend.
The Akhra model was a refreshing departure from the typical conferences we attend, both in the outdoor setting and the participatory nature of the sessions. Knowledge here resided in the audience, not on stage; wisdom emerged from the crowd.
Another Samvaad fellow spoke about the gaps in the scheme delivery system caused by the missing integration of line departments with the government portal. Yet another shared the experience of developing a barren area of land by bringing together seven line departments and several beneficiary groups to create a “Water User Group” that built consensus for and executed a 30-Lakh project, leveraging the budget from the line departments.
This was a world vastly different from the one I was immersed in everyday, back in Bangalore. My worldview was a few levels of abstractions removed from the ground reality these people were describing. And this reality I was hearing about rarely featured, in the context of development, in mainstream media. Policies, schemes, state departments, etc were one side of the story; what became evident here was the glue needed at the village level (“the last mile”) to make all of it work together towards social development. Without these local actors, achieving “scale” through those policies and schemes would perhaps remain a theory.
* * *
The amphitheater of the Tribal Cultural Center was the location of the “Akhra” sessions. Beneath a vibrant, sweeping canopy of crimson and gold stripes, participants from the tribes sat on terraced steps wearing traditional attires, ready to engage in a dialogue moderated by the Samvaad team. The day’s subject was “Circle of Belonging: Tapping into Tribal wisdom on social governance systems”.
Members of various tribes asked for the mike and stood up to speak about the systems active in their communities, how they worked, what the challenges were. A common theme touched on their approach of trying to solve matters locally, through village councils or assemblies. There could be family or religious or legal issues – anything that affected the community. The resolution would follow a path: village first, then a cluster of villages, and only if still unresolved was the matter taken to court.
There was a conversation on why these local systems mattered and why some were being eroded. External influences, some said, disturb the internal balance and harmony of the local communities – strong traditions and systems were needed to maintain a balance. Among these “External Influences” were WhatsApp and Facebook – things younger people leaned more towards. “Why don’t we learn from elders instead of being influenced by WhatsApp?” someone asked.
What could be done to preserve these local systems and traditions? Someone suggested an inclusion of tribal-related subjects in the national level education programmes. Another spoke about the necessity to document cultural elements among the tribes so that future generations don’t lose this knowledge. A young man from Nagaland gave a presentation on their institution called “Morung”, highlighting how it had evolved over generations.
The next morning, in another Akhra session, some of the conversation centered around social justice. Displacement of tribals, access to forests they lived in and around, awareness of forest rights – these were discussed and stories were shared.
Implementation of laws favouring the tribals was often lagging in different states, and there was little clarity on the stage of implementation of these laws. On the other hand, laws that favoured the state were often quick to be picked up and implemented.
Lack of awareness about the “system” (of how “pattas” – a government issued document that proves land ownership – were allotted, what forest rights they had) came up prominently.
The success stories shared were illuminating. One man described how they had to lodge a case against the district collector to speed up the process of getting their “patta” – it worked. Another spoke about the protests and rallies that were needed to stop the police from arresting tribals who entered a forest area they’d been using for generations but was recently labelled “Reserve Forest.”
The Akhra model was a refreshing departure from the typical conferences we attend, both in the outdoor setting and the participatory nature of the sessions. Knowledge here resided in the audience, not on stage; wisdom emerged from the crowd. The sheer diversity of representation – over 150 tribes from the country – was another striking difference.
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A day dense with discourse leaves the mind heavy. The evening brought respite in the form of a cultural celebration at the Gopal Maidan, a large open space now adorned with stalls where tribes displayed their cuisines, medicines, and handicrafts.
At the center was a stage that featured dances and performances from bands. (This Monday had performances by Ho, Garo, Kuki and Kandha tribes, the music of Summersalt from the Khasi Hills, Garima Ekka and Arjun Lakra.) And all around, Samvaad participants, delegates, and local Jamshedpur residents blended together, occasionally forming impromptu groups or rings dancing to music ringing across the maidan.
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The scale of Samvaad – 2500 tribals from over 150 tribes – was impressive, but my most enduring takeaway was the spirit of Akhra, the platform that created a space for dialogue unlike any other I’d seen.
It was my first visit to this extraordinary event. Luck had brought me to Samvaad this time, but when I left Jamshedpur I resolved to not leave future visits to chance. We knowledge workers need to step out of our bubble and listen to voices from the ground – what better way to do this than spending a few intense days at Samvaad?
Acknowledgements: These experiences, compressed across a day and half, were possible only due to the generosity of Tata Steel Foundation and the unceasing hospitality of Sumant Kumar, the “protocol officer” assigned to me. Sumant accompanied me throughout, guiding me within and across venues and sessions. He also enlisted me into a guided tour of the Rusi Modi Center of Excellence, where the archivist took us on a tour of the galleries and archives, sharing nuggets of the history of the Tatas across a century and a half. Sumant made this visit special – I can’t thank him enough.