Indigenous Knowledge Management for Disaster Mitigation and Sustainable Development in the Eco Community Villages of India

Abstract

Traditional knowledge incorporates knowledge of ecosystem relationships and a code of ethics governing appropriate use of the environment. This code includes rules and conventions promoting desirable ecosystem relations, human-animal interactions and even social relationships, since the latter continue to be established and reaffirmed through hunting and other activities on the land. Traditional knowledge articulates with non-traditional knowledge to form a rich and distinctive understanding of life and the world environment. In this context, systematic and in-depth studies on eco community’s indigenous knowledge capacity building for disaster risk reduction and management are rare in India. Indigenous knowledge, as such, is not well documented, let alone digitized, and is in eminent danger of being lost as its custodians pass away. It is crucial to preserve this valuable body of knowledge and integrate it into modern disaster risk reduction efforts. The inclusion of indigenous people into discussions of climate change and risk reduction cannot be ignored. Lack of organized study in this area has led to vulnerability of communities and the nation as a whole in coping with natural disasters. Several studies are available on the value of indigenous knowledge for natural resource management in Africa and Asia-Pacific countries. However, literature on indigenous knowledge for disaster mitigation and preparedness is scattered and very scarce. Systematic and in-depth studies on disaster mitigation in general and indigenous knowledge in particular would be very useful in this regard. In order to bridge this gap, the present project eventually aimed to designing and development of a web-portal with the name A.A.D.I.GYAN- Augmenting Action for Disaster Management through Indigenous Knowledge; meant to promote a global scale and commonly shared digital platform for dissemination and enrichment of Indigenous knowledge and practices across eco-communities of India and abroad based on a fully developed and functional web-site. This portal is a part of digital library initiatives for documenting, preserving and promoting the role of Indigenous knowledge in mitigating natural and man-made disasters, particularly among Eco-communities. It carries an extensive research database covering various states of India and possibly some other countries and their respective hub-locations (Eco-community/ tribal regions), with a scope to expand at global scale, containing data and information about indigenous activities related to Agriculture, Medicinal plants, Green technology, Healthcare, Education, Environment Management, Socio-Cultural and Spiritual Practices, Employment, Housing etc. It entails a shared web-platform facilitating real-time interactions and exchange of ideas, knowledge and information among all stakeholders -Community, Government, Experts, Researchers, Environmentalists and Academicians. It promises to be a very rich database with an innovative structured classification system for the purpose of systematic arrangement, dissemination and retrieval in order to facilitate further research and distribution of information at global scale. It would have a project team constituted of Environmental Scientist, Consultant, Experts and Academicians. As a project with limited coverage, the work done so far on the above lines has revealed several significant and interesting aspects and applications of traditional knowledge for building long term social, economic and environmental capacities in the eco-communities of India.