Consider the following statements and select the correct answer from the options given below: Statement 1 : Vanrawats are dwellers of the Pithoragarh district. Statement 2 : Vanrawats practised shifting cultivation until it was banned by the forest department.
- (a)Statements 1 and 2 are both correct
- (b)Only statement 1 is correct and statement 2 is incorrect
- (c)Only statement 2 is correct and statement 1 is incorrect
- (d)Both the statements are incorrect
Correct — A, Statements 1 and 2 are both correct.
The Vanrawats are the community usually written as Raji — van or ban means forest, so the name itself reads "forest Rawat".
The Raji recorded in Uttarakhand live in Pithoragarh district in Kumaon, with a smaller number of households in Champawat next door. Statement 1 holds.
Statement 2 describes the life they led before settlement. The Raji lived off the forest — hunting, digging wild yams, bartering hand-carved wooden vessels — and cropped forest patches that were cleared, burnt, used briefly, then left to recover.
That last practice is shifting cultivation, and it ended when the forest department's restrictions closed the forest to it and the community was moved onto fixed land. So both statements are correct.
Carry away one idea: the Vanrawat is the Raji, the forest-dwelling tribe of Pithoragarh whose shifting cultivation was stopped by forest-department restriction.
- (b)Only statement 1 is correct and statement 2 is incorrect — Statement 2 is not wrong, so half-marking the pair fails.
Shifting cultivation names a technique — clear a patch, burn it, crop it while the ash-fertility lasts, then move on — and the Raji worked Kumaon's forests that way before the forest department closed the practice off.
This is the option you reach for if you carry the idea that slash-and-burn belongs only to North-East India. That assumption, not the statement, is what fails here.
- (c)Only statement 2 is correct and statement 1 is incorrect — Statement 1 is sound. The Raji hamlets recorded in Uttarakhand lie in Pithoragarh district, with Raji households also reported from Champawat next door, and the statement makes no claim that they live nowhere else.
This option would fit a version of statement 1 that put the community down in the plains. The Terai of Udham Singh Nagar is Tharu country.
The Buksa hold the Terai–Bhabar of Udham Singh Nagar, Nainital and Dehradun. Either way the tract is lowland, not the Kumaon hill forest of the Raji.
- (d)Both the statements are incorrect — Rejecting the pair outright is tempting when the name Vanrawat is unfamiliar, but both halves check out — the district in statement 1 and the practice in statement 2.
This code is right only for a pair that gets both halves wrong: say, one placing the community in Jaunsar-Bawar, which is Jaunsari country in Dehradun district, and crediting it with terraced settled farming.
Shifting cultivation is a method, not a place. A patch of forest is felled and burnt, sown for a season or two while the ash keeps the soil fertile, then abandoned to fallow while the cultivators open a fresh patch.
It suits country where forest is plentiful and people are few, and it depends on mobility. Settle the cultivators, or close the forest to them, and the cycle cannot continue.
The Vanrawat, or Raji, are that kind of community in Uttarakhand — a forest people of Pithoragarh who hunted, gathered and cropped forest patches before being moved onto permanent land.
Uttarakhand's tribal map is small enough to hold whole. The Terai and Bhabar belt carries the Tharu and Buksa, Dehradun's Jaunsar-Bawar the Jaunsari, the high border valleys the Bhotia, and the Pithoragarh forests the Raji.
The Raji sit at the vulnerable end of that map.
Along with the Buksa they are notified as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group, a category built around a pre-agricultural level of technology, a low level of literacy, economic backwardness and a declining or stagnant population.
Their story is also the ordinary forest-policy story: state control over forest land ends a mobile subsistence, and settlement follows. That is exactly the thread joining the two statements in this question.
- The Vanrawats are also known as Raji, Ban Rawat or Banraut; van and ban both mean forest.
- The 2011 Census recorded the Raji at district level — 382 in Pithoragarh and 127 in Champawat.
- The Raji speak Raji, a Tibeto-Burman language, called Bat-Kha in Pithoragarh and Bot-Kha in Champawat.
- Uttarakhand's Scheduled Tribes are notified as Tharu, Buksa, Bhotia, Jaunsari and Raji.
- Buksa and Raji are the two Uttarakhand communities notified as Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups.
- Traditional Raji subsistence combined hunting, digging wild yams, and bartering hand-carved wooden bowls and vessels.
- Raji-speaking communities also live across the border in far- and mid-western Nepal, in districts such as Kailali, Bardiya and Surkhet.
- The PVTG criteria are a pre-agricultural level of technology, a low level of literacy, economic backwardness, and a declining or stagnant population.
The item turns on placing the community: the Raji are the forest tribe of Pithoragarh, not a Terai or a Jaunsar people.
- Vanrawat and Van Gujjar share the word van but are separate communities — the Van Gujjars are buffalo-herders of the Shivalik forests, not the Raji of Pithoragarh.
- Statement 1 says the Vanrawats are dwellers of Pithoragarh; it does not say they live nowhere else. Remembering Raji households in Champawat is no reason to mark it false.
- Reading shifting cultivation as a North-East label. It is defined by the clear-burn-crop-fallow cycle, and that cycle was worked in Kumaon's forests too.
- Judging a two-statement item as a package. Each statement has to be settled on its own before the code is picked.
- Confusing the Raji with the Bhotia, who also live in Pithoragarh district but in the high border valleys, and who are associated with trans-Himalayan trade rather than forest cropping.
This item is a name-to-place match dressed as a statement pair. Decoding the name first helps: van or ban is forest, so a Vanrawat is a forest-dwelling community, which already steers you away from the Terai and from the high trade valleys.
The second statement tests whether you treat shifting cultivation as a technique or as a regional label, and it adds the policy half — who ended the practice. Read the description of the practice, not the region you associate it with.
CAPF_GAI_2020_Q842020Same practice, different scale. That item matches shifting-cultivation names — Milpa, Ladang, Rocca, Masole — to their countries, testing the vocabulary of the technique worldwide. This UKPSC item asks instead which Indian community practised it and what ended the practice, so the knowledge needed is ethnographic and state-specific rather than a global name list.
CDS_GK_2023_II_Q832023The same match-the-list device on the same topic, with a partly different name set — Roca, Chena, Masole, Tamarai. Both that item and this one rest on knowing that shifting cultivation is one technique wearing many local names; the UKPSC item drops the international vocabulary and localises the practice to a Kumaon forest tribe.
ESE_GS_2020_Q532020Shared idea: shifting cultivation as something the state moves to control. There it appears as 'control of shifting cultivation' among river-basin water-resource management practices, framed through catchment protection. Here the control is exercised by the forest department against one community, so the same policy stance is seen from the side of the people it displaced.
UPSC_2013_GS1_Q262013Both turn on the relationship between forest dwellers and the forest administration. That item asks who initiates the determination of forest rights under the 2006 Act — a question about giving statutory rights back to forest communities. This one records the earlier stage, where departmental restriction closed a forest livelihood; it is history rather than law.
UKPSC_2016_PRE_PaperI_Q212016A weaker but real link: both are Uttarakhand district-placement items, and Pithoragarh figures in both option sets. The 2016 question places a physical feature, the Khatling glacier, while this one places a community. The skill transferred is the same district map of Uttarakhand; the content is glaciology in one case and tribal geography in the other.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Vanrawat (Raji) community of Uttarakhand is chiefly associated with which district?
- (a)Udham Singh Nagar
- (b)Dehradun
- (c)Pithoragarh
- (d)Uttarkashi
Answerc — Pithoragarh. The Raji recorded in Uttarakhand live in Pithoragarh district in Kumaon, with a smaller number of households in Champawat next door.Udham Singh Nagar is Terai country, the tract of the Tharu and Buksa. Dehradun holds Jaunsar-Bawar, home of the Jaunsari. Uttarkashi's high valleys are Bhotia country.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Milpa, Ladang and Roca are regional names for which agricultural practice?
- (a)Terrace farming
- (b)Shifting cultivation
- (c)Plantation agriculture
- (d)Floating gardens
Answerb — Shifting cultivation. Milpa in Mexico and Central America, ladang in the Malay world and roca in Brazil are local names for the same clear-burn-crop-fallow cycle.Terrace farming works permanent levelled fields cut into a slope. Plantation agriculture is large-scale, commercial and single-crop. Floating gardens raise crops on rafts over water, as on Dal lake.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Which pair of Uttarakhand communities is notified as Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups?
- (a)Tharu and Bhotia
- (b)Buksa and Raji
- (c)Jaunsari and Tharu
- (d)Bhotia and Jaunsari
Answerb — Buksa and Raji. These are the two Uttarakhand communities carried on the list of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups.The Tharu, Bhotia and Jaunsari are Scheduled Tribes of Uttarakhand, but they are not on that list, so each of the other pairings brings in at least one community that does not belong there.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Raji language, spoken by the Vanrawats of Pithoragarh, belongs to which language family?
- (a)Indo-Aryan
- (b)Dravidian
- (c)Tibeto-Burman
- (d)Austroasiatic
Answerc — Tibeto-Burman. Raji is a Tibeto-Burman tongue; its speakers call it Bat-Kha in Pithoragarh and Bot-Kha in Champawat.That is what makes the case worth remembering: Kumaoni and Garhwali, the languages spoken all around the Raji, are Indo-Aryan. Dravidian languages are concentrated in peninsular India, and Austroasiatic ones — Munda, Khasi — in central and eastern India.