NEWS was “ protected ” from their animals . No prior notification had been given to them , and they were not consulted . Because the Raika are on the move for about nine months a year , they are hard to contact – even for policymakers .
But aside from this logistical difficulty , the neglect of pastoralists stems from a lack of understanding of their role in maintaining ecosystems , which is only now being documented . The herds that pastoralists tend have been found to reduce the chance of forest fires by reducing biomass ; similarly , the services of pastoral communities in seed dispersal , soil fertility and biodiversity is only beginning to be understood .
Their customs often emphasise striking a balance with nature , because their lives are dependent on the ecosystem . For example , among the Changpa – a community that herds the famous pashmina goats on the India-China border – water is carefully conserved . Water used to wash hair is carefully saved to be reused ; nothing is ever wasted and everything is a “ resource ”.
Figure 3 : A camel herder drives a herd through the Thar Desert towards Pushkar for the annual trade fair , Rajasthan , India © Alamy
Dinesh Rebari works with the Maldhari Vikas Sangathan in Gujarat , India , a nongovernmental organisation working on issues affecting pastoral communities . A pastoralist himself , he said these traditional practices and the knowledge behind them should ideally feed into government policymaking . “ We need easy access to common lands and rangelands , we need to be able to use these resources , and our voices should be heeded in their management . These are not demands that would serve only the pastoral communities , these are demands that would conserve these rangelands and help us preserve them for generations to come ,” he said . He said he hoped that the UN will declare a special IYRP .
A range of problems
At a meeting of pastoral communities in Gujarat in 2015 , Anu Verma , who works with the South Asia Pastoralist Alliance , reported that such communities across the world are under stress . Many are forced to withdraw from traditional livestock keeping as the lands they earlier had free access to have been acquired by governments or privatised . Mechanised technology in agriculture has meant a vast expansion in settled agricultural production , to the detriment of rangelands .
For communities that migrate across national boundaries , there are additional worries . The Maldharis of Afghanistan used to move into Pakistan in the winter , but war and instability have limited this . Their route is now heavily policed ,
Figure 4 : Adaptive practices of pastoralists rarely make it into the books of “ official knowledge ” © Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
and documents such as passports and identity cards are required for crossing the border , which pastoral people often do not have .
Many South Asian pastoral communities travel from the cold Himalayan deserts to the drylands of the arid southern deserts . They raise and live with , camels , yaks , buffaloes , sheep , goats , horses and donkeys . In recent years , groups of pastoralists from India , Afghanistan and Nepal have started to collaborate , comparing notes and attempting to collectively pressure their national governments to draft policy in their favour . This group , which has come together under the umbrella of the South Asia Pastoralist Alliance in the past two years , has begun mapping rangelands and the pastoralists in these areas . It is set to expand to include members from Bhutan and Bangladesh .
The Alliance estimates that 173 million acres in India is rangeland , and up to 75 % of India ’ s rural population depends on such lands . In the past three decades , non-recognition of the traditional rights of pastoral communities and indigenous peoples has caused such lands to be taken over for other purposes .
A 2011 judgement of India ’ s Supreme Court mentioned this loss of common grazing lands : “ What we have wit-
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