Vol. 7, Issue 2, Part D (2025)

The Kandha community in Odisha patriarchal tribal society of India, is one among the most colourful indigenous groups empowered with its traditional matter-of-fact hood, culture, and educational processes rolling under various transformation contours exposed to contemporary patterns. The changing means of making a living and the changes in culture over time are at the heart of this study. In the past, Kandhas had their forest-based sustenance practices of shifting cultivation, horticulture, and non-timber products collection based on principles of ecological integrity. But with the geographical expansion of settled agriculture, wage-labour, migration, and horticulture, their livelihoods have also diversified. Along with economic changes, it has contributed significantly to social and cultural transformations through the introduction of formal education in post-independent India. The education has enabled the Kandha youth to become literate, socially mobile, and politically conscious, but at the same time, it has resulted in cultural tampering, language degeneration, and identity crisis. Older ways of knowing and ways of life, such as unique forms of tattooing, are disappearing with the advent of modernity. Notwithstanding these challenges, programs such as Mukta Gyan Kutira and the MLE project have demonstrated the possibility of infusing cultural knowledge into formal teaching-learning processes. Education emerges as a double-edged instrument, being an agency of empowerment as well as destruction. It supports culturally relevant curriculum, bilingual methodology, community involvement via Tribal Education Monitoring Committees, and preservation of oral traditions through the Tribal Cultural Resource Centre. The study is in sync with the inclusive and equitable vision of NEP 2020 that calls for a need of education system to focus on development while protecting our indigenous identity.