Dynamics of Livelihood Diversification: A Study on Rural Tribal Youth of Tripura, India

As fall out of transforming land use pattern coupled with the factors like resettlement, exposure to alien environment and effort to adjust with the new socio-agro-economic order, based upon their capability and resource endowment status, the tribal youth of North East Indian state of Tripura are in the look for various alternative occupations for their livelihood. In this backdrop, a study was conducted in two tribal dominated districts of the state, Dhalai and Gomati, to trace out the mechanism of interplay of various socio-personal factors over livelihood vis-a-vis occupational diversification of the tribal youth. Primary data were collected from 120 tribal youths following multistage sampling. Correlation and multivariate path analysis was undertaken for analysis of data. The delineation of decomposition of total effects against each of the perceived explaining variables into their respective direct, indirect and via effects as outcome of multivariate path analysis showed that land holding size, annual expenditure and economic motivation had the three highest order positive direct as well as indirect effect on the occupational diversity for resource poor category, whereas asset endowment, land holding size and economic motivation were of highest order for their resource endowed counterpart. Moreover, while annual income, achievement motivation and social inclusiveness revealed first three highest order negative direct as well as indirect effects on the occupational diversity for resource poor category, those were annual income, decision making ability and cosmopoliteness for the resource endowed category. Still further, a handful of variables was also found to have substantially interplayed in channelling their indirect effects through one or the other predictor variables. Occupational diversification appeared to be the consequence of a complex interplay of multiple factors. However, the appearance of substantial residual values as outcome of path analysis called for inclusion of more supplementary contextual explainers for any such future study.