Between the Forest and the Factory Floor: Triple Liminality and the Unrecorded Lives of Tribal Women Migrants in India

In the study of human movement, researchers often sort people into two simple boxes: those who are forced to leave their homes by war or disaster, and those who choose to move for a better job. This binary view works well for many situations, but it fails to capture the complex reality of millions of tribal women in India. These women belong to communities that have lived in harmony with India's forests for centuries, where they often hold significant social power and freedom compared to women in the rest of the country. However, when they leave their villages, they enter a world where their old protections vanish and new ones do not exist. To understand this specific struggle, we must look at three overlapping states of being. First, there is the loss of their connection to the land and the forest, which defines who they are. Second, there is the sudden collapse of their social equality when they encounter the strict gender rules of city life. Third, there is the gap between the laws that promise them safety and the reality where those laws are never enforced. When these three forces combine, they create a unique kind of vulnerability that standard statistics often miss.

A new paper by Keerti Dewal from the University of Mumbai brings this hidden story into focus. The research argues that tribal women migrants are not simply victims or voluntary workers, but are caught in a state the author calls "triple liminality." The word liminality describes a threshold, a space of being "in-between" where a person has left their old life but has not yet found a new one. For these women, this in-between state is not a temporary pause but a permanent condition shaped by three distinct pressures. The first pressure is ecological. Tribal life is deeply rooted in the forest, where women are the keepers of knowledge about plants, medicine, and food. When they are pushed out of their villages by mining, dams, or the loss of forest rights, they lose not just their income, but their identity. In the city, their deep knowledge of the forest is invisible and useless, stripping them of the status they once held.

The second pressure is social. In many tribal communities, women have more freedom to move and make decisions than women in mainstream Indian society. But when they migrate to cities, they often end up working as domestic helpers in private homes. This work places them in a world governed by strict patriarchal rules, where they are isolated and have no legal protection. They move from a society that respects their autonomy to one that treats them as invisible servants. The third pressure is legal. India has many laws on paper designed to protect tribal people and prevent trafficking. Yet, once a tribal woman crosses a state border, she steps out of the reach of her home state's protections and into a city where those laws are rarely enforced. She exists in a legal gap where she is technically protected but practically defenseless.

The paper challenges the idea that migration is always a choice or a result of a single sudden disaster. Instead, the author introduces a new category called "structurally coerced migration." This describes a situation where a person seems to choose to move, but the choice is made because their livelihood has been slowly destroyed over years. It is like being pushed off a cliff by a slow erosion of the ground beneath your feet rather than a single shove. The research shows that while tribal people make up only about 8.6 percent of India's total population, they account for nearly half of all people displaced by development projects like dam construction and mining. These women are not just moving for work; they are moving because the forest that sustained them has been taken away, and they are left with no other option.

The data used to build this picture comes from a wide range of official sources, including the national census, labor surveys, and crime reports. The numbers reveal a stark reality. While official records say most women migrate for marriage, other surveys show that nearly half of all female migration is actually for work, but this is hidden because the census asks for the primary reason for moving, not the job they take afterward. In the cities, these women face severe exploitation. A tribal woman working as a domestic helper in a city like New Delhi might earn less than a male laborer in a rural village, and often less than the minimum wage because domestic work is excluded from many labor laws. The situation is so dire that tribal women from states like Jharkhand and Odisha make up a large portion of the victims of human trafficking, yet the conviction rate for these crimes remains shockingly low, at around 10 percent.

The author argues that current policies are failing because they treat these women as either rural residents or urban workers, but not as both. Laws that protect tribal land rights stop working the moment a woman leaves her village, and city laws that protect workers often ignore the specific vulnerabilities of tribal women. The paper suggests that the solution requires a new approach where rights travel with the person. This means creating laws that recognize tribal women as legal subjects who carry their protections from their home state to the city where they work. It also calls for better data that specifically counts tribal women migrants, rather than grouping them into broad categories that hide their struggles.

Ultimately, the research concludes that the forest has always been a threshold for these communities, a boundary between their way of life and the outside world. What has changed is that this threshold no longer offers a way back. The path from the forest to the factory floor or the city home is no longer a journey of choice, but a path of necessity created by the slow dismantling of their world. By understanding the triple layers of loss—ecological, social, and legal—policymakers can begin to see these women not as statistics, but as people navigating a broken system that demands a new kind of justice.