Nomads of India

Nomads are known as a group of communities who travel from place to place for their livelihood. Some are salt traders, fortune-tellers, conjurers, ayurvedic healers, jugglers, acrobats, story tellers, snake charmers, animal doctors, tattooists, grindstone makers, or basketmakers. All told, anthropologists have identified about 500 nomadic groups in India, numbering perhaps 80 million people—around 7 percent of the country's billion-plus population.

The nomadic communities in India can be broadly divided into three groups hunter gatherers, pastoralists and the peripatetic or non-food producing groups. Among these, peripatetic nomads are the most neglected and discriminated social group in India. They have lost their livelihood niche because of drastic changes in transport, industries, production, entertainment and distribution systems.

Though very poor and deprived they are still not facilitated with any constitutional safeguard and concern. Statistics show that governments are applying development policies which are basically invented for scheduled tribes or scheduled casts. The government of India in early 2006 has set up a commission for the development of these communities.

Nomadic tribes have always been a source of suspicion to sedentary people. In the colonial period, the British normalized a set of notions about such groups that echoed European ideas about the gypsies, whose origins are in the Indian subcontinent. They listed such groups that posed a ‘threat’ to settled society and introduced a legislative measure, the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in 1871 and as a result of which nearly 200 such communities stood ‘notified’ as criminal.

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