Each morning, 46-year-old Shailaja rises at 5 a.m. Before 8 a.m., she has eaten breakfast and walked a mile up a mountain to an Indigenous village, where she tutors 22 teens in grades 8 to 10 in math and the Marathi language. Before the students begin attending the government school at 10 a.m., she also tries to help them with any other problems they have encountered.
Shailaja, who has been a teacher for 14 years, is one of a group of animators – teachers, health workers and social workers – trained and paid by the Archdiocese of Bombay to work with Indigenous, or tri-bal, villagers. She works out of the mission station in Alibag, a beach town about 60 miles south of Mumbai.
Tribals, sometimes referred to as Adivasis, make up nearly 9% of the Indian population. The Indian Constitution ensures their educational interests, provides economic safe-guards and takes steps for political empowerment. The 2006 Forest Rights Act empowers forest dwellers to access and use the forest resources in the manner to which they were traditionally accustomed and aims to protect forest dwellers from unlawful evictions — much of their land is mineral rich, and corporations have exploited the lack of documen-tation of ownership.