WISDOM ROOTED IN THE WILD: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AMONG INDIA’S TRIBES

Abstract

India's tribal communities are custodians of one of the world's richest bodies of traditional ecological knowledge. Long before the language of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) entered global policy discourse, tribal societies across the subcontinent had already built systems of resource management, agriculture, and healing that were both ecologically sound and socially embedded. Their traditions, craft economies, and community institutions continue to sustain cultural identity alongside environmental balance. Travelling from the Eastern Himalaya to the southern hill forests, this paper traces how customary rules around hunting, fishing, farming, and plant use have functioned, in practice, as conservation strategy verified here against census data, ethnobotanical research, and documented case studies rather than taken on faith. The paper argues that tribal India should not be read as a society lagging behind a modern developmental trajectory, but as one that had already internalised several of that trajectory’s central goals, long before those goals acquired a name.