How a company run by Adivasis in the Nilgiris won a prestigious UN prize

Traditional healer Janakiamma, 60, belongs to the Kurumba community. An indigenous community in South India, Kurumba is listed by the Union government as one of India’s Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups. The Kurumbas are primarily honey collectors, apart from doing small-scale farming for a living, marked by low-level literacy and economic backwardness among other indicators.

Janakiamma has not had formal education, but she is now the director of a farmer producer company in the Nilgiris district in Tamil Nadu. Started by the Adivasis, for the Adivasis, Aadhimalai Pazhangudiyinar Producer Company Limited, located in Kotagiri in Nilgiris, has seven directors from the indigenous communities at the helm of affairs.

The story of an uneducated Adivasi woman from an economically poor background who went on to head a company with over 1,600 shareholders runs parallel to the story of Aadhimalai itself, the farmer producer company that started as a small Adivasi collective but has bagged this year’s Equator Prize by the United Nations Development Programme.

One of our 2021 #EquatorPrize winners, Aadhimalai Pazhangudiyinar Producer Company Limited, proves that Indigenous management of productive ecosystems can offer sustainable and profitable results. Learn about how they are reshaping Indigenous economies: https://t.co/27DrbnptF5 pic.twitter.com/rx5Xq5jC4J

— UN Development (@UNDP) October 4, 2021

The company, initiated by a non-profit Keystone Foundation in the Nilgiris, won…

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