Department of Social Sciences, Dr. Y.S. Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry, Nauni, Solan-173 230, India
1Department of Economics and Sociology, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana-141 004, India
Livelihood is a multifarious concept referring to what people do to manage revenue for living with the assets at their disposal and what they achieve by doing it in a particular context. In the past decades, livelihood diversification has received much attention from researchers and policy makers with high hopes that promoting it can offer a pathway for poverty reduction and economic growth. Therefore, an attempt has been made in this paper to identify the determinants of livelihood diversification of the tribal people using primary data collected based on multistage random sampling from 120 households of Kinnaur, one of the remote districts of Himachal Pradesh. The Simpson livelihood diversification index was found higher for salaried group as well as Agriculture+ Services group. Out of the 9 determinants of diversification of livelihoods identified, level of education, access to irrigation, membership and training have positive and significant effect on livelihood diversification activities. However, land-man ratio has negative and significant correlation with livelihood diversification sources. Therefore, the findings of this study implies that development policies in the region should consider education, skill generation, membership of formal organization and better irrigation facilities as the key areas for the better development and diversification of tribal households.
Livelihood diversification, Tribal households, Simpson index, Determinants, Multiple regression analysis
