Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, India
– On a cool October evening in 1970, Bidawadi, then 21, was heading home after a day of planting trees in the forest when she received some bad news: a leopard had killed her buffalo. For her family, this would mean the loss of a secondary but crucial source of income — selling buffalo milk. Bidawadi was distressed by the news, but not altogether surprised. Incidents like these were common. They came with a life of uncertainty for the community living in the forests of northern India’s Shivalik hills.
Fifty years later, those hardships seem minor compared with what the forest dwellers of Sodhinagar village in Uttar Pradesh state face today. On an afternoon in late October 2020, Bidawadi sits cross-legged on a charpoy, a rope cot, outside her hay-thatched hut dressed in a loose, white salwar-kameez. “The world has developed, but everything is the same for us,” she says, “except that we no longer have the work that gave us our identity.”