The Malnad — the wet, forested hill country of Karnataka’s Western Ghats — supports livelihoods organised around areca and spice plantations, coffee smallholdings and the collection of forest produce. The plantation economy is old and layered: many households that work it are themselves migrant or historically tied labour, and the line between farmer and worker is often blurred, with the same family owning a small plot and working on a larger one.
Tribal and forest-dwelling communities hold recognised rights over parts of the forest under the Forest Rights Act, 2006, which for the first time gave legal standing to cultivation and collection that had been treated as encroachment. In practice their share of the plantation economy is limited: the Act recognises rights over land already under cultivation rather than creating new entitlements, and community forest rights over collection and management have been granted far more slowly than individual rights.
The forest itself is now governed by several regimes at once. Large parts of the Ghats are protected areas or reserved forest, which restricts what can be collected and where; the Western Ghats has also been the subject of repeated attempts to demarcate an ecologically sensitive area, each of which has been resisted by the communities living in it. Conservation rules and crop-price swings together shape how much the forest actually pays the people who live beside it, and both are set far from the Malnad.
