ABSTRACT

‘Honey? We don’t collect honey’ would be the often repeated phrase when a team of young development professionals started to travel the state of Tamil Nadu in South India in 1994 to understand honey gatherers and honey bees. Twenty years on the indigenous people who collect honey and understand the ecology of the bees are at the centre of an intervention that has had implications across many regions of the Indian subcontinent. Keystone Foundation was registered as a voluntary agency in 1993 with a mission to work on ecologically sound development issues; wild produce and forest dependent people became the focus of the work. The agency is based in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, part of the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot. Over the years the organization has paved the way for a forest-based livelihood intervention that is socially, ecologically, culturally and politically responsible. The intervention addresses the most marginalized communities of India, the Scheduled Tribes or Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (in government parlance) or adivasis (literally ‘first people’) who live nearest to biodiversity rich forest areas.