DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2016.v04i01.019

Pages: 115-120

This paper examines the intersecting trajectories of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs, 2000-2015) and the unfolding realities of climate change among the tribal communities in Kerala. While Kerala achieved impressive aggregate progress towards the MDGs, acute malnutrition is common among these communities. School dropout rates among tribal children stood at 46 percent at the primary level and 38.5 percent at the secondary level, directly challenging the achievement of universal primary education (MDG 2). Maternal health (MDG 5) remained precarious, with anaemia and low birth weight reflecting intergenerational undernutrition intimately linked to hunger and food insecurity (MDG 1). Political marginalisation, with tribal communities constituting a negligible vote bank, has rendered their struggles largely peripheral to mainstream political discourse. Simultaneously, climate change has emerged as an independent and compounding threat. Forest-dependent communities, face imminent livelihood collapse as biodiversity shifts and species dieback accelerate. The Paniya, Kuruma and Kattunayakan communities of Wayanad have long reported changes in animal behaviour and phenological patterns through their traditional ecological knowledge, yet this knowledge is systematically excluded from official adaptation strategies and climate negotiations. Crucially, historical land dispossession has forced these communities onto precarious slopes and riverbanks, creating a "historically produced" risk landscape where climate-induced landslides and floods exact a disproportionate toll. The Adivasi experience reveals that without securing land tenure, integrating indigenous knowledge systems and explicitly addressing structural discrimination, both global development frameworks and state-level adaptation policies will continue to reproduce the inequalities they claim to resolve. Caught between the MDGs' aggregate successes and the accelerating climate reality, Kerala's indigenous people