Ooty: While the globe observes the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People on Wednesday, the Nilgiris Documentation Centre (NDC), an NGO based in Kotagiri, has called for giving indigenous people status to Badagas of Nilgiris, who are now in the backward class category.
It has appealed to the Society for Managing Tribal Resources Centre at Ooty not to separate Badagas from other indigenous people of Nilgiris.
There are over 370 million indigenous people spread across 70 countries worldwide. Practicing unique traditions, they retain social, cultural, economic and political characteristics that are distinct from those of dominant societies in which they live, Mr D. Venugopal, Director of NDC, said.
The first Commissioner of Nilgiris, J.W. Breeks, in his monumental work “An Account of the Primitive Tribes and Monuments of the Nilgiris” in 1873, classified the Todas, Badagas, Kotas, Kurumbas and Irulas who inhabited the upper Nilgiris as ‘Hill tribes’.
But he described the other tribes except the Badagas as ‘Primitive tribes’ depending on their level of development, Mr Venugopal explained.
“While Todas, Kotas, Kurumbas and Irulas were included in the list of Scheduled Tribes in 1950, the Badagas were listed as Backward Class. In recent decades the Tamil Nadu government had recommended to the Centre to include Badagas in the list of Scheduled Tribes,” he said.
Whatever be the economic classification of the five tribes it has been well established they were interlinked culturally for hundreds of years in an exceptional and exemplary manner and that same relationship and harmony continues even to this day, Mr Venugopal said.
