Environment and Sustainable Development: a Study among the Tribes of Eastern Ghats in Andhra Paradesh

This paper provides the existing interrelationship between environment and sustainable development. In addition to this, it discusses about tribal ecology, livelihoods of tribes, issue of shifting cultivation and deforestation, Indigenous knowledge of tribals in protection, conservation and regeneration of natural resources and strategies for sustainable development of tribes in Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh specific and other tribal areas, in general. All these aspects in the paper are explained with the evidence of an empirical case study of Eastern Ghats forest environment of A. P. in which around 27 hill tribes inhabits. These tribes are distributed in the tribal sub-plan areas of Visakhapatnam, Srikakulam, Vizianagaram, East Godavari, West Godavari, Khammam, Mahaboob Nagar and Warangal districts of Andhra Pradesh. The paper comprises of both semantic and scientific explanations with ethnographic methodological descriptions. This paper forms the part of a Major Research Project Report "Environment and Sustainable Development : An Anthropological Study Among Tribes of Eastern Ghats in Andhra Pradesh" sponsored by I.C.S.S.R., New Delhi.