Keonjhar: Even as traders in cities rake in the moolah by selling seasonal forest fruit like blackberry, forest dwellers, who originally collect them, get little from it thanks to absence of market and preservation facility, a report said.
Resentment is brewing among them as the administration doesn’t bother to take any measure to protect their interests, it was learnt.
People living on the periphery of forests often manage to run their families for about eight months a year by collecting mango, jackfruit, kendu, custard apple, Jamun (black plum or Indian blackberry) and other fruits available in the woods.
However, they hardly get the worth of their labour. Further, their livelihood has been affected due to felling of hundreds of trees in the name of road expansion, some villagers said, adding many trees have also been chopped off during establishment of industrial units and mining activities.
According to reports, the demand for fruits collected from the forests of Keonjhar is high in other places. After mango, blackberries available in the forests are most sought in other states. Traders visit the district in June, an appropriate time for collection of Jamun, and take away the fruit in trucks. While they earn mega buck selling them in cities like Cuttack and Bhubaneswar, the tribals who collect the fruit painstakingly are left in the lurch. Jamun of Keonjhar is also sent to Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.
The blackberries available in Keonjhar are of good taste and have medicinal values for which they are in great demand, a trader said.
While the collectors get a paltry Rs 100 to Rs 150 per basket of Jamun, the fruit is sold at Rs 200 a kg in places like Bhubaneswar which is more than the cost of a kg of grapes, it was learnt.
While Jamun trees grow automatically in natural forests, they don’t grow up in man-made forests due to lack of maintenance and measures for their preservation, environmentalists said. In the absence of facility for preservation and marketing, forest dwellers are often cheated by profit-mongering traders, it was observed. PNN