Somewhere in the sal forests south of Jagdalpur, a 62-year-old Muria Gond woman named Sukhmati carries a headload of tamarind and mahua flowers to a collection centre that her grandmother also walked to. The centre belongs to a cooperative that was registered in 1948 — just months after India‘s independence — and against every reasonable … Read more
In a weekly haat in Koraput district, a Kondh tribal woman named Kamala Majhi spread out her sal seeds, dried mahua flowers, and hill broom grass on a plastic sheet last monsoon. A middleman offered her ₹8 per kilogram for sal seeds — the same seeds that, once processed into sal butter, fetch ₹300 per … Read more
In Dindori district’s Karanjia village, a Baiga tribal woman named Sukhiyabai earned ₹47,000 in a single season selling processed mahua flowers and sal seeds — nearly three times what middlemen paid her just four years ago. Her story is not an outlier. It is the direct result of a cooperative infrastructure quietly reshaping how India‘s … Read more
