ABSTRACT
In the late autumn of 2009, a series of unsettling news reports started to call attention to the toll that malnutrition was taking on the Bhil communities of western Madhya Pradesh. The malnutrition deaths in Jhabua in 2009 and 2010 are expressive of the entrenched food insecurity that plagues the state of Madhya Pradesh, where malnutrition rates among children surpass those of most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, the deaths from malnutrition, the dwindling subsistence agriculture, and the increasing resort to labour migration dovetail with both regional and national poverty dynamics among Adivasis. The poverty suffered by Adivasis in contemporary India is arguably best understood in terms of their ‘adverse incorporation’ into regional political economies: on this reading, material deprivation is the result of ‘the operation of existing social relations and the adverse terms of inclusion in socio-economic systems’.
