Sustainable Livelihood System of the Tribes in Chhattisgarh State of India: A Tribe’s Perspective Analysis

An attempt has been made in this paper to investigate the sustainable livelihood system of the tribes living in Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh during the year 2014-2015. The ex-post facto research design was employed for this investigation. The sample size of 135 tribes was selected randomly from the nine villages of the Bilaspur district. In this study in order to assess the overall sustainable livelihood system of the tribes the six capitals of sustainable livelihood namely human capital, physical capital, natural capital, social capital, financial capital and information communication capital were analyzed. The findings of this study depicted that the tribes had 40.17% extent of status with respect to their overall sustainable livelihood. With regard to six capitals of sustainable livelihood it was found that the tribes had medium level of extent of status for their human and social capitals while for remaining four capitals they had low level of extent of status. Correlation analysis indicated that out of 15 selected variables, only 13 variables were significantly correlated with extent of sustainable livelihood either at 0.05 or at 0.01 level of probability. The R2 value of multiple regression analysis reveals that all the selected 15 variables in the study jointly exhibits 66.40% contribution towards variation in the extent of sustainable livelihood of the respondents. From this study, it may be concluded that for increasing the existing level of sustainable livelihood of the tribes the emphasis should be given to improve all six capitals in general and physical, natural, financial and information communication capitals in particular. In this way, findings of this study will helps the planners and policy makers in planning and implementation of more relevant, ground based and successful tribal development programmes and policies in the Bilaspur district in particular and in the Chhattisgarh state in general.