Dr Rajkamal Goswami & Duman Talom
On the balmy afternoon of 8 April in Itanagar, vegetable vendors in the main Gandhi Market, located in Ganga, went about their business as usual, displaying their wares – and sprinkling water often to the keep them fresh, as day temperatures reach almost 30 degrees C. The wares are all essentially ‘bioresources’, comprised of a mix of cultivated and uncultivated edible plant products in the form of fruits, vegetables, leaves, shoots, flowers, inflorescence and herbs. In the right seasons, it also can also include smoked fishes, insects, frogs, crabs and rodents – none of which are ‘farmed’, akin to the commonly available carps, broiler chicken and cultured shell-fish.
Compared to aloo, tamatar, baingan vendors, local bioresource vendors, who are mostly women from indigenous tribal communities, always attract a lot of footfalls – because they all sell ‘local organic sobji’ as is known in common parlance. That’s because by convention, most cultivators grow vegetables in jhum or swidden fields embedded within a dynamic matrix of forest, fallows of different lengths and active cultivated plots. And by convention, jhum farming doesn’t require the use of any chemicals, neither to fatten their crops nor to keep away insects. The organic matter in subsurface soil and the ash from burning the slashed wood out performs any pesticide or fertiliser that is manufactured in faraway factories.
All the uncultivated bioresources are also ‘organic’ by default because, as one of my Adi friends from Siang valley aptly put it: “Jongol me sab kuch system bhogovaan bana chukka hai. Humlog bas uska fol khata hai (In the forest, everything is already designed by the divine. We just partake of its bounty.)”
Many vendors of Gandhi Market bring their own harvest and the uncultivated bioresources that they themselves gather, or catch – mostly from in and around their farms or from their forests, which they often privately own, or it belongs to their village common pool resource. Such individual and private rights are constitutionally recognised in India and at the ground, they are governed through customary norms.
Most people are well aware of this simple, rustic arrangement – and until the 8th of April, it remained undisturbed. That is, until a group of uniformed and un-uniformed vigilantes – presumably ill-informed – decided to step in. They harassed vendors, accusing them of breaking the law by selling what they termed “jongol sobzi (literally: forest vegetables),” and proceeded to confiscate the produce.
In the process, it was the consumers who became collateral damage – left without their ingredients for the day. The drama, meanwhile, served as fodder for click-hungry content creators and entertainment for bystanders, who are never far from any unfolding conflict.
What even is ‘wild’?
The term ‘wild edibles’ misleads. It suggests rarity, remoteness – something untouched. But most so-called wild foods thrive in human-shaped ecologies: jhum fields, homesteads, village commons. Thus, most of the so-called ‘wild’ food thrive in anthropogenic ecologies: for example,
the east Indian glory bower (oying/owin), fiddlehead fern (takang/oritaka), Indian prickly ash (onger/hibe). Many are semi-cultivated, others regenerate precisely because of human presence, for example, hairy Pouzolz’s bush (oyik), black nightshade (okomamang/yanga), hill gynura (ogen/jogen).
Thus, what we call uncultivated is often subtly managed – through protection, selective harvesting, and centuries of observation.
In this light, the phrase ‘wild edibles’ is not only imprecise, it’s politically loaded. A better term therefore is ‘uncultivated bioresources’ to reflect their active management and cultural value. These are not wilderness extras; they are ecological commons, deeply integrated into diets, medicine, and seasonal calendars.
All this, however, doesn’t mean that forests do not supply edibles. They indeed do. But as the bioresource data collected by ATREE research team from 11 of the largest markets in Northeast India, including Arunachal Pradesh, has shown that anywhere between 60-75% of the total biomass of uncultivated bioresources are not collected from ‘forests’ but from jhum, homestead and embankments.
So what are forests, really?
To the urban mind, forests are imagined as untouched wilderness, state-controlled territory, and zones of total protection. All three are myths.
No land is untouched – Everest has garbage heaps. Wilderness is not Eden; it’s a story we tell by erasing people. In Arunachal, forests are not pristine – they are lived in, farmed, worshipped, and known. The idea that nature and people are opposites is a colonial fiction, upheld unfortunately by bureaucracy.
In Arunachal, only 31% of the forests are under the jurisdiction of the Forest Department. The remaining 70% are owned by individuals, clans and villages and are governed through oral traditions, custom and ancestral memory. These are not ’empty’ lands. They are ecological systems rooted in community and care.
Is selling uncultivated bioresources – both of plant and animal origin – illegal?
The Arunachal Pradesh Women’s Welfare Society (APWWS) rightly condemned the seizure, calling it arbitrary, illegal, and deeply unjust. Field checks confirmed what many feared: indigenous women – most the sole earners in their families – had their only source of income destroyed without due process. Their perishable wild harvests, the result of sustainable traditions, were confiscated and discarded. This was not law enforcement; it was an assault on food sovereignty and traditional knowledge – precisely what conservation claims to protect.
Let us be unequivocal: there is no law in Arunachal – or in India – that forbids the sustainable harvest and sale of uncultivated wild foods. Unless these species are notified under the Wildlife Protection Act’s schedules, or gathered from inside a legally notified protected area without permission, there is no statutory basis for seizure. The Forest Department’s top brass confirmed this in a rare and welcome act of administrative clarity on 9 April. The principal chief conservator of forests (PCCF) in his official statement distanced the department from the incident and reaffirmed the rights of indigenous communities to harvest and trade in wild bioresources in local markets.
Markets are ecologies too
Local markets like Gandhi Market are not just places of trade. They are living ecologies. They reflect the seasonal rhythm of forests, the gendered knowledge of harvesters, and the resilience of subsistence economies. Women vendors are often curators, not just sellers. They know which fern is tender in April, which tuber needs boiling thrice, which shoot is safe to consume only after the first rains. When these women are policed, it is not just economic damage that’s inflicted. It is epistemic violence. It’s a form of erasure: of memory, autonomy, and culinary history.
And yet, the seizures happened. Why? Because power fears ambiguity – and Arunachal’s forests are full of it: oral codes, matrilineal knowledge, legal pluralism and customary tenure. These don’t fit into file notings or top-down control. For the vigilantes in question, what can’t be governed must be criminalised.
This isn’t conservation – it’s performance – a spectacle of assumed power masquerading as environmentalism. The women selling wild ferns weren’t destroying forests; they were sustaining them. Their crime? Belonging to a system that resists bureaucratic erasure. When women walk miles to harvest seasonal greens and bring them to the market, they are not violating the forest; they are enacting a relationship, much older than the Indian state and its bureaucratic codes and rules.
We’ve normalised a green-washed colonialism that treats indigenous people as trespassers. Forest produce is criminal in Itanagar, yet celebrated in Delhi’s gourmet aisles. Tribal cuisine is hip on menus, but illegal when sold by tribal women.
We must remember that forests are not empty sanctuaries – they are living, negotiated, storied. Gathering uncultivated bioresources isn’t exploitation. It’s continuity. Relationship. Survival.
Conservation must protect more than species. It must protect the people and practices that keep those species alive. Until then, let’s call this what it is: not protection, but predation. (The contributors are from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology & the Environment, Pasighat)
