Ukhrapahari sits in the heart of the forest. Cows feed quietly on the sparse grass around the edge of the village; chickens and goats scatter with the arrival of a car, a rare interruption. In the centre of the village, Mercilla Tudu – a gold nose pin glinting, a red flower tucked into her hair – sits in the shade of a bamboo shelter.
A shelter under which, once a week, the village comes together – to discuss farming, rituals, local disputes. To discuss life.
There are no halls, walls or concrete benches. Women in bright saris sit together on the ground on an orange tarpaulin sheet, children settling in front of them. To their left, the men cluster together, some sitting, while others stand and watch. The shelter is little more than a thatched roof held aloft by wooden poles, itself under the canopy of wild mango and mahogany trees – the only refuge from the sun. As they filter in, they greet each other with one word; a word that means salutation and respect; a word that signals that these are their own. “Johar.”
Five months ago, Tudu and her husband Baghal Hembrom were not at the everyday gathering. They were over 2,000 kilometres away, in Kerala’s Idukki district, working on cardamom plantations. That journey from Ukhrapahari in Jharkhand’s Dumka district took them four days by bus. Waiting for the couple was a matchbox room – 8 feet by 8 feet. At home, there was no money. But hard labour in Kerala earned them INR 500 (USD 5.20) each a day – enough to save for sand, stone and other construction materials to build a house in Ukhrapahari. “Now that we have saved enough, we do not want to go back,” says Tudu.
Because their small village was more than a place to live. It was a part of who they were. Everyone was Santhal. Everyone spoke Santhali. It was safe. It was home.
In June, Dialogue Earth travelled to Dumka and spoke to Adivasi (a term referring to the Indigenous populations of India) families and community leaders in Ukhrapahari and Burhidangal, two villages located ten kilometres apart, and found that migration is increasingly becoming temporary rather than permanent. Residents no longer leave with the intention of settling elsewhere. Instead, they migrate to meet expenses that the village itself cannot generate – building a house, paying for weddings or avoiding debt – returning once those needs are met.
Experts tell Dialogue Earth that two forces are shaping this migration in Jharkhand. First, the sustainability of Adivasi life is being eroded by mining, declining agricultural incomes, erratic rainfall and government apathy. Second, in the states they frequently migrate to – such as Gujarat, Kerala, Maharashtra, Telangana and West Bengal – many experience exploitation and a deep alienation from their language, land and community.
Local records show Burhidangal and Ukhrapahari, for instance, have 65 and 42 households respectively. Community leaders in both villages estimate that around half have one family member working outside the state. Many who migrated have returned. Others continue to move back and forth. The pattern extends beyond these two villages: estimates from the 2023 Jharkhand Migration Survey show that Dumka had around 273,000 current migrants and nearly 39,000 “return migrants”.
In Dumka, leaving has become part of staying.
Where the forest begins to fray
From a distance, the forests appear untouched. During the monsoon, the hills are covered in green, and streams cut through the landscape, sometimes cascading down as natural waterfalls. It is only on the roads and the railway lines that another identity begins to emerge. Long queues of trucks wait near mining sites, their tyres leaving tracks in the darkened soil. In Dumka town, 30 kilometres from Ukhrapahari and Burhidangal, coal wagons line up at the railway station, their soot so persistent that it settles in the crevices of the terracotta tiles on the station platform, refusing to be washed away.
Jharkhand is one of India’s largest coal-producing states, and production has increased by over 60% between 2017 and 2025. As of July 2026, there are 23 coal mining leases registered under the Dumka Mining Office. Vincent Murmu, project coordinator at the non-profit Lahanti, which works to improve socio-economic conditions for tribal communities in the area, says mining has changed the forests Adivasi communities have long structured their lives around.
For generations, families have relied on the forests for food, fuel, medicine and supplementary income. They gather seasonal fruits and wild leafy greens for everyday nutrition. Sal leaves, mahua flowers, tendu leaves and honey provide an additional source of income. “But even the forest is disappearing from around us,” says Loveen Hembrom, an Ukhrapahari village leader.
Both villages have applied for recognition of their community forest rights under the Forest Rights Act, which recognises the customary rights of forest-dwelling communities over woodlands they have traditionally used. But these rights are yet to be granted. “Until they are recognised, communities remain uncertain about their long-term control over the forests,” says Avijit Karmakar, a programme manager at Lahanti. “When mining happens, forests are cleared for extraction. People are worried they could be next.”
The large-scale coal mines closest to the villages are open-cast. In a 2016 report titled “When land is lost, do we eat coal?”, Amnesty International characterised such mining as removing all vegetation on the surface of the land, blasting and clearing the soil above the coal deposits, and then extracting the coal in strips. Though open-cast mining has relatively low production costs, it has a significant, adverse environmental footprint of dust and noise pollution, as well as land degradation, deforestation and soil erosion.
Elderly villagers say fewer than half of the varieties of wild leafy greens they used to gather for food can now be found in and around Adivasi villages. “We believe the declining diversity of forest foods is affecting nutrition,” Karmakar says.
Virginius Xaxa, an academic who is one of India’s leading Adivasi scholars, says the size of tribal landholdings has steadily declined across India, in part because land gets divided within families over generations, but also due to the loss of land through debt, alienation and intimidation. “Although many households still have some land, it is not enough to sustain them through the year,” Xaxa says. Such land would typically be used for farming and livestock rearing.
From the ordinary to the profound, cultural traditions woven into the forests around them become harder to sustain. Every Santhal wedding requires a branch from the sal tree. But as the forests change, sal branches become harder to find, leading some families to reuse them from one wedding to the next. As Lahanti’s Karmakar puts it: “Jungle hai toh Adivasi hai. Adivasi hai toh jungle hai.”(The Adivasis exist because of the forest. The forests exist because of the Adivasis.)
When water becomes work
Every evening, before the village meets in Burhidangal, Stein Sila Hasda tucks metal pots beneath her arm and starts walking. The first such journey is made long before dawn, and the last, just as the sun is dipping. Sometimes she wears worn-out slippers, but for the most part, her callused feet navigate narrow, uneven paths of scraggly rock. She walks for close to half an hour before reaching a spring, which emerges to create a small pond around 10 metres below the path. Like the women around her, she climbs down the steep embankments with empty vessels, before struggling back up with the water that her household needs.
The natural pond is unclean, shared with cattle and wild animals. Drinking from it has led to illness in some families, but there is no alternative. Even pregnant women must make the same arduous walk and drink the same water. “We have to make multiple trips,” Hasda says. “It is exhausting.”
Neither Ukhrapahari nor Burhidangal has functional piped water supply. In January 2025, government officials went to Burhidangal, dug the earth and laid a pipeline as part of the Jal Jeevan Mission, explains Prem Hasda, a Burhidangal resident. The government initiative promised tap connections to all households in rural India by 2024. But in 2026, there is no water. “They never came back,” he says. In Ukhrapahari, there has been no visible progress at all, several residents told Dialogue Earth. The Jal Jeevan Mission dashboard lists the scheme as “in progress” in both Burhidangal and Ukhrapahari and records four deep tubewells in these villages. But on the ground, residents remain dependent on unclean sources of water.
Dialogue Earth spoke to Rounak Kumar, a junior engineer at Dumka’s Drinking Water and Sanitation Department, who says that both villages fall under the Shikaripara-Kathikund Full Block Coverage Multi Village Scheme, part of the Jal Jeevan Mission. Kumar adds that around 65% of the project has been completed, but water can’t be supplied until work across the multi-district scheme is finished. Kumar says that pending clearances from the forest department and the National Highways Authority of India have delayed construction, with the completion deadline pushed to 2028.
According to the Central Ground Water Board, as of end-2025, about one-third of monitored wells in Jharkhand have declining groundwater levels compared with the previous decade’s average. Researchers say limited natural groundwater recharge and a lack of artificial recharging facilities have contributed to this. Increased reliance on tube wells has added further pressure on groundwater resources.
Further, Dumka receives 60% of its annual rainfall during the monsoon period between June and September. A 2017 study published in the journal Climate notes that Jharkhand faced a downward trend in annual and monsoon rainfall in the 20th century, with Dumka among the districts facing the greatest decline. More recently, this decline has persisted: Jharkhand has experienced eight years of below-normal rainfall over the last 25 years, Abhishek Anand, head of India Meterological Department’s centre in Ranchi, recently told Mongabay.
For Adivasi communities that depend almost entirely on rainfed farming, this decline is having devastating consequences. “It is unbelievable that communities whose generations have spent their entire lives being surrounded by water now face such scarcity,” says Bitiya Murmu, the chief executive of Lahanti.
The main problems are scarcity and the rate of change. But unpredictable fluctuations are also hard to deal with. “Sometimes there is too much rainfall, and sometimes there is not enough,” says Murmu. Data from the non-profit Council on Energy, Environment and Water’s Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment Information System shows Dumka’s annual rainfall has become more unpredictable, with year-to-year variation about 17% higher in 2000-2025 than in 1980-1999. Rainfall ranged from 1,822 mm in 2006 and 1,641mm in 2017, to lows of 967mm in 2018 and 959 mm in 2022. Karmakar explains: “The erratic rainfall makes tribal communities lose their Indigenous knowledge and confuses the traditional agricultural calendar.” This year, for example, villagers say unseasonal rainfall meant close to half of the mahua flowers – a vital source of food, income and cultural identity for the Santhals – failed to bloom.
As water disappears and the rains turn erratic, a land once comfortable in its predictability stops giving.
The places that did not understand them
Three years ago, 32-year-old Phuleen Hembrom decided she had to move to Hyderabad, the southern metropolis of more than 11 million people. In Ukhrapahari, her family of seven cultivated maize, rice, millet and vegetables. But without dependable rainfall, there was never enough food. “She had to leave because we had nothing to eat here at home,” says her brother Loveen.
In the city, with its bright lights, Phuleen lived in its underbelly, working as a welder who earned INR 300 (USD 3) a day. Some days she began at 8am and toiled until midnight. Working nights made her feel anxious, unsafe. She barely spoke any language other than Santhali, and communication was a problem. “It was exhausting for her,” Loveen says.
Three months ago, Phuleen returned to Ukhrapahari, to the forests and the fields; to the evening village meetings. Here, she has autonomy and the ability to decide when she can stop work. Here, she is surrounded by friends and family who understand her. “Even if farming becomes difficult here, she will not go back,” Loveen says.
Xaxa says it is difficult for Adivasis to settle permanently in cities because, for centuries, they have lived in rural landscapes and find themselves unaccustomed to congested settlements or slums. They find themselves far away from their primary language and from social worlds rooted in community, and are often isolated with few social connections. “Freedom is what they value,” Xaxa says. “They don’t like to go somewhere where they are constantly under someone else’s command. When they depend on employers and contractors, their lives are organised very differently. That transition is difficult.”
Karmakar says that most migrants who leave Jharkhand are unregistered, making it difficult to track where they work, or intervene when problems arise. “Sometimes they end up in very dangerous situations,” he notes, adding that Lahanti has come across cases where residents boarded buses arranged by labour contractors without knowing where they were being taken. There have also been cases of women being harassed while working outside the state.
In Burhidangal, under the setting sun, young girls dressed in bright turquoise costumes giggled, still wearing the clothes from a Santhal folk dance they had performed earlier. When they danced, they beamed. When they forgot a step, they burst into laughter. Jogesh Murmu smiled at the cacophony before him. Burhidangal’s elected village headman travelled to Pune last year, where he earned INR 450 (USD 4.50) a day as a construction labourer. He was overworked. More than that, he felt alone. He returned within the year. “I returned because I want to live close to my family, my village and the forest,” he says. “This is our way of life.”
And yet, with the forests under pressure, water still not reaching homes, and rain no longer keeping time, Murmu is worried. “My sister is getting married next year,” he says.
So he will leave once more, earn what he needs and then return.
To his people. To the forest. To the clearing under the jackfruit trees. To Burhidangal.
