11th Jan. 2019


Every summer and winter, members of the Korku tribe near Melghat, Maharashtra, don big cotton outfits covered in fine mesh and head out to the forests.

Their mission is complex: they must collect wild honey from the trees, but do so without killing the bees or destroying the hive. So they delve carefully into the hive’s ‘kitchen’, extracting the honey without damaging the rest of the structure. “That’s the only section that has honey. It is so unnecessary to break the entire hive,” says Gajanan Kale, a conservationist who works with Korku tribals. This way, the bees can reuse the hive three times.

Sometimes wild resources can indeed be harvested sustainably. But sometimes, they are not. And as consumers who thrive both on dadima’s nuskha (home remedy) and luxury ayurvedic brands, we don’t know where our arjuna bark or forest honey come from, and how they are extracted.

A wild idea

In truth, there are several aromatic, medicinal or rare biological resources used in industry, not all of which support sustainable pickings, or share profits with local communities, who are the true guardians of these resources. Now, a landmark judgment from the Uttarakhand High Court last month sets out to change that.

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