Livelihood and Natural Resources: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Paraja Tribe of Koraput District, Odisha, India

The nexus of Paraja tribes with their natural resources is complex, extending from time immemorial to the present day and beyond. Parajas are traditionally cultivators and partly rely upon NTFPs and MFPs to supplement their livelihood. Natural resources play a requisite role in the life of the Parajas, especially the lands and the forest. They have learnt to co-exist over time with the nature and therefore their livelihood is primarily natural resource (NR) based. They have shifted their livelihood towards daily wage labour to give a helping hand to their livelihood as the crop land resources remain the same while the family size have increased over time. The paper is an attempt to analyse the socio-cultural dimensions of natural resource based livelihood of the Parajas. The present study is empirical and based on primary source of data, to conduct the research; field work was carried out at Balda village of Koraput district in Odisha state. Observation, schedule and interview are the central research techniques executed to collect the field data. pruposive sampling method was executed followed by snowball sampling. The paper also stationed to analyse agriculture as a culture of the Parajas and the cyclical nexus among natural resource, knowledge and culture