When eight-year old Sindhu of a Kani tribal settlement near Palode returned home from school late in the evening, she found her house charred to ashes.
In a fit of drunken senselessness, her father had set fire to the house. Having lost her mother to cancer, the little girl has been a bundle of insecurity after the incident, sleeping in various houses and even on the forest floor.
In what is a fallout of their shift from community living and the traditional matrilineal system, the tribal children from broken families in many settlements of the state are facing severe insecurity problems.
Orphaned children, who would have been earlier looked after by the community, are also now finding life in nuclear tribal families a difficult proposition.
The Government UP School at Njaruneeli, alone has over a dozen children who come from broken families or families where one of the members are severely disabled.
When a third standard student was absent for over a week, headmaster Venukumaran Nair and a non-teaching staff member Vijayan travelled all the way to the Chembikkunnu settlement to find out what was wrong.
“In that house, there was no father or mother. There was just an 80-year-old grandmother who was too ill to look after the child. He had to go to the forests to find something to eat,” said Venukumaran Nair.
If it was Sindhu’s father who set fire to the house, for a little boy coming from the Manjanudathumkadavu, it was a wild rogue elephant that turned villain.
Incidents of man-animal conflict in the settlements when tuskers destroy tribal cultivations and often houses are becoming common.
Vineetha Menon, head of the Department of Anthropology of Kannur University, said that till a few decades ago, when they moved as groups, bringing up children was a collective activity among the tribes.
“The concept of marriage was different and children without parents were the collective responsibility of the tribe.
Integration of the tribals into the mainstream has brought about a change in this thinking. Yet, the mainstream has failed to address such problems,” said Vineetha Menon.
The integration of the tribals into the mainstream, at least in the southern districts seems to have brought down the incidence of exploitation of the tribal women.
Sandhya, the statistical officer at the Kerala Institute for Research, Training and Development Studies of Scheduled Castes and Tribes (KIRTADS) said that in a study soon to be published, they found that the incidence of ‘unwed mothers’ is a negligible 0.03 percent in the tribal settlements of Thiruvananthapuram district, which is far below when compared to districts such as Wayanad and Kasargod.
However, teachers of the tribal schools say that the problems of the orphaned child are often so grave that incidence of child labour is also on the high.
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