Deforestation and Transition of Tribal Population: A Study in Kokrajhar district of Assam, India

The migrations of tribal people and their changing attitude towards the forests are often held responsible for persistent deforestation in different parts of the world. Even though this discernment is based on facts, analyzing the circumstances that drag tribal people to such situations is also equally important. As per Kokrajhar district of Assam in India is concerned, although the overall growth of tribal population is lower than the growth of other population over the period 1961-2001, there was significantly higher growth rate of tribal population in forest area of the district. Meanwhile the share of tribal population in the non-forest area of the district was decreasing gradually. While, during the middle of the period, growth rate of non-tribal population in the forest area notably declined, during the recent decade there was a slide increase in it. Conversely, tribal population increased erratically during the middle of the period, but during the recent decade it did not only declined all of a sudden, nevertheless the growth rate collapsed to reach a negative value. Despite diminishing of tribal population, deforestation is going on at large scale in the district in recent years too. On the other hand, owing to the too much profit-making attitude of the forest department and devious tactics of some clever outsiders, the attitude of the tribal people towards the forest, who were forest friendly in olden times, is found to deviate substantially and seen to involve in detrimental activities of damaging forests.