JAYANTA RONGPI is a doctor and a member of the Communist Party of India Marxist Leninist . He represents Karbi Anglong in Assam, a seat reserved for Scheduled tribe members

JUAL ORAM, Union minister of tribal affairs, is in the Lok Sabha from the Sundargarh constituency in Orissa

ARVIND NETAM was, till the mid 1990s, one of the most promising tribal politicians of India. He was deputy minister of education in 1973. He rejoined the Congress in 1998 after leaving it in 1996.

The condition of India’s forest and her forest dwellers is extremely grave. A fresh round of police attacks on tribal people

A major conservation issue, particularly in the tropics, is habitat loss and fragmentation due to developmental activities and increasing human populations.

Under the Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme in south-western West Bengal, regenerating deciduous forests are being managed for the extraction of numerous plant products, both for commercial benefits and subsistence-level use, on a large scale.

The involvement of local communities in protecting and conserving forests has become a priority concern with aid agencies, governmental departments, NGO's and others concerned with biodiversity conservation, to the extent that participatory forest conservation has become a buzzword in conservation circles.