ASM-Sanjeevan Initiative

Flipping the Science Model in Purulia, India: Grounding Mission Science in Tribal Rainfed Landscapes

Before sunrise in Purulia, when the air is briefly cool, 17-year-old Phulmani steps out with her grandmother to collect water from a hand-scraped pit in a dry riverbed. On their walk back, her grandmother points to a small grove of sal ( Forest hardwood tree) and mahua trees (Butter tree) and murmurs how in her youth these forests signalled the seasons, when to sow, when to collect forest produce, when water would rise in the wells. Those cues are fading now. The forest is thinning, the soil is harsher, and the monsoon no longer listens to the old rhythm.

For Phulmani, the erosion is not just environmental but generational. Her father left for Bengaluru after repeated crop failures; her mother works as a daily wage labourer when work is available. Her family’s future shifts with every failed harvest, every dry hand pump, every year the mahua flowers bloom too early or too late.

A Landscape Losing Its Balance

Purulia’s lateritic terrain has always demanded care. Traditionally, tribal communities read the land closely: the first call of certain birds, the blossoming of mahua and sal, the behaviour of winds before monsoon storms. These were ecological signals for sowing, grazing, conserving water, and managing forest cycles. Today, those signals are unreliable.

Heat arrives earlier. Rainfall is erratic. Forest cover has thinned from overextraction and shifting land use. The soil, once held together by roots and organic matter, is exposed and fragile. Streams decline, fish populations shrink, and minor forest produce, once critical for women’s income and family nutrition, has become scarce.

Water, Health, and the everyday burden

Women across Purulia rise before dawn to collect water from shallow pits. Solar taps provide only two to three buckets a day per household—barely enough for drinking and cooking. Whatever is gathered from rivers or pits is often muddy and contaminated.

These daily compromises show up starkly in health outcomes. The district’s infant mortality rate is 38.34 per 1,000 live births. Maternal mortality stands at 176.38 per 100,000 live births. Access to clean water, safe nutrition, and stable incomes is not just a development issue; it is a matter of survival.

Livelihoods under strain

Agriculture has become unpredictable. Traditional cropping calendars no longer align with new climate patterns. Soils depleted by heat and erosion reduce yields and force families into debt. Forests that once supported livelihoods through lac cultivation, leaf-plate making, fuelwood, and fruits now provide less each year.

With limited options, young people turn to illegal sand mining for steady income. But sand mining degrades rivers, accelerates erosion, destroys habitats, and disrupts groundwater recharge, worsening the very constraints that push people into this work. This vicious cycle, where economic necessity drives environmental destruction, deepening livelihood insecurity, exemplifies Purulia’s interconnected crisis.

The changing face of Migration

Migration has always existed, but its character has shifted. What was once seasonal male migration has, in the past six to seven years, become family migration. Parents take children along, leaving older relatives behind to manage whatever land remains. Traditional village governance structures—once mediated by elders with deep ecological knowledge—are weakened as more families leave.

The broader pattern aligns with national data: districts like Purulia are listed as migration hotspots under climate stress in the IIPS National Migration Survey (2021). India recorded over 41 million interstate migrants in the 2011 Census. The Economic Survey (2016–17) estimated 90 lakh people moving each year between 2011 and 2016. For Purulia’s predominantly rural population (87%), migration is increasingly an act of necessity, not choice.

The interlinked crisis

Purulia’s challenge is not a single failing resource; it is a tightly interconnected system under strain:

Heat stress and erratic rains disrupt agriculture, undermining food security.
Soil degradation and forest thinning erase traditional ecological cues and reduce backup incomes.
Groundwater decline, worsened by erosion and sand mining, intensifies health and livelihood risks.
Migration hollows out community structures, weakening the transmission of tribal knowledge.
Loss of traditional practices—soil restoration techniques, water harvesting customs, seasonal ecological readings—reduces the district’s adaptive capacity just when it is needed most.

Each stress amplifies the others, narrowing the space for resilience.

Memory, Knowledge, and Resilience

Yet beneath all the statistics lies a quieter truth. Traditional ecological knowledge remains deeply rooted. Sacred groves endure. Seasonal festivals continue. Customary practices still guide how communities understand forests, soil, and water. Elders recall how they once learned to read the faint signals in the land, the smell of damp soil before a good rain, the slight lean of a tree hinting at underground moisture, the softness under loose gravel revealing where water rests. Even as the land strains, these cultural systems hold memory of how to conserve moisture, how to read the land’s shifting cues, how to regenerate forests, and how to live with scarcity rather than resist it.

A District at a Threshold

Purulia stands at a moment of convergence, where ecological decline, livelihood insecurity, and cultural loss are reinforcing one another. Without coordinated efforts to restore landscapes, revive traditional ecological knowledge, stabilize incomes, and strengthen community systems, the district risks losing both its natural assets and the wisdom that once enabled people to thrive in a demanding environment.

For families like Phulmani’s, the future depends on whether Purulia can rebuild resilience by drawing on modern science alongside inherited knowledge. Ecological restoration, livelihood diversification, and cultural renewal must move together, as each depends on the others.

Purulia calls for an approach that is patient, adaptive, and sensitive to the interlinkages between climate resilience, aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and social equity. It provides a vital context for shaping and strengthening equitable strategies across eastern India’s rainfed and tribal regions.

Local partner: the Sanjeevan initiative

For over six decades, MANT has worked in Purulia and neighbouring tribal areas, building deep trust through health, education, livelihood, and environmental initiatives. In 2024, together with partners, MANT launched the Sanjeevan initiative to co-create resilience solutions with communities across Puncha, Bandwan, and Manbazar—combining agroforestry, nutrition gardens, water conservation, regenerative agriculture, and livelihood diversification, with strong roles for women and youth. Sanjeevan is rooted in traditional ecological knowledge and local institutions, and provides the practice base with which ASM will collaborate.

The Asia Science Mission: Linking local wisdom with Scientific Support

The Asia Science Mission (ASM), one of the International Science Council’s Science Missions for Sustainability, represents a paradigm shift in how science engages with complex sustainability challenges. Rather than relying on top-down, externally driven research, ASM seeks to flip the science model: starting from local realities, co-designing inquiries with communities and decision-makers, and using systems science to support practical, context-specific solutions. This approach follows the International Science Council’s call in “Flipping the Science Model: A Roadmap to Science Missions for Sustainability” to design science that is co-created with society and focused on real-world solutions at speed and scale.

In Purulia, ASM-Sanjeevan will help “flip the science model”. Instead of researchers arriving with pre-set projects, communities, local organisations like MANT, and government actors are involved from the start in defining priorities and questions. ASM then brings in systems thinking, maps, and data to support those priorities, and sets up feedback loops so everyone can see what is working and adjust over time. This is what we mean by building a “learning-ready” landscape: a place where people, institutions, and ecosystems can learn and adapt together, rather than reacting in isolation.

ASM-Sanjeevan will:

Co-develop a systems diagnosis of Purulia’s land–water–forest–livelihood nexus using tools such as integrated mapping, risk indicators, and strengthen system-wide learning about how land, water, forests, and livelihoods interact, and how communities can adjust their decisions as conditions change.
Support data and monitoring, helping local actors track changes in soil moisture, vegetation, water access, migration, and health in simple, useful ways.
Strengthen co-design platforms, where communities, local government, and scientists jointly prioritise interventions and learn from pilots.
Connect Purulia to a regional learning network, linking its experience with other ASM demonstration sites.

Synthesize lessons for policy, translating local experience into insights that can inform district, state, and national programmes for rainfed and tribal regions.

Over time, ASM-Sanjeevan aims to demonstrate how mission-oriented, co-created science can gradually shift a vulnerable landscape onto a more resilient trajectory: modest but measurable gains in soil moisture and vegetation, more secure and diversified livelihoods, stronger local institutions, and a renewed role for traditional ecological knowledge in decision-making. Insights from Purulia will feed into a wider ASM knowledge synthesis, helping inform strategies for other upland, rainfed, and tribal regions across Asia.

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