Family and community: the first units of social order

Detail

1. The family: the oldest unit of society

• Family is the oldest and most basic unit of society. It is the first group a child belongs to, and it is where the child first learns rules.
• Two main types live side by side in India:
• Joint family: several generations live together, for example grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts and children.

• Nuclear family: a couple and their children, or one parent and the children.

• Kinship words show how deep family bonds are.

• Hindi has a separate word for each relative: bua (father's sister), tau (father's elder brother), mausi (mother's sister).
• Tamil has different words for elder and younger siblings: anna (elder brother), akka (elder sister), thambi (younger brother), thangai (younger sister).

• Many Indian languages have no single word for "cousin". Cousins are often called brother or sister.

• Family roles rest on four things: love, care, cooperation and interdependence (each member depends on the others).

2. The family as a "school" of values

• The family teaches values before any school or government does:
• ahimsa: non-violence.
• dāna: giving to others.
• sevā: service without expecting a reward.

• tyāga: sacrifice, or putting others' needs before your own.

• Dharma as duty: the NCERT chapter opens with a verse by Tiruvalluvar (author of the Tamil Tirukkural). It presents dharma as doing one's duty towards others, and the family is where this duty is first practised.

• NCERT case 1: Shalini's joint family, Kerala
• An uncle loses his job before Onam (Kerala's harvest festival).
• The family shares its Onam clothes and celebrations with him, so his crisis is shared by everyone.

• Lesson: the joint family works as an informal safety net (support that catches a member who falls into trouble).

• NCERT case 2: Tenzing's family, Meghalaya

• His mother works in a handicraft cooperative, a group of workers who jointly own a business and share its profits.
• His father shares the household chores, so work at home is not divided strictly by gender.
• The family decides special expenses together.
• His grandfather files complaints about power cuts and collects money for neighbours hit by a storm.
• Lesson: values learnt in the family spread to the neighbourhood and to dealings with public authorities.

3. Joint vs nuclear family: points for discussion

Aspect	Joint family	Nuclear family
Support	Many hands for care of children, the old and the sick	Smaller support base, so more reliance on paid help or the state
Economic security	Pooled income and shared risk (Shalini's uncle)	Depends on one or two earners
Values transfer	Grandparents pass on language, customs and values	Fewer generations under one roof
Freedom	Less privacy; elders may control decisions	More privacy and personal choice
Fairness	Hierarchy by age or gender may go unchallenged	Easier to share roles equally (Tenzing's father)

• Why nuclear families are rising: migration to cities for jobs, small urban homes, the wish for privacy and independence, and smaller family sizes.

4. Community: connected families

• Community means connected families or people who share a place (village, neighbourhood), an identity (jāti, religion, region), an occupation (farmers, fisherfolk) or an interest (school clubs, NSS – National Service Scheme, NCC – National Cadet Corps). Members support one another.
• What communities do together:
• celebrate festivals together
• pool labour at sowing and harvest time

• agree on rules for the commons, meaning resources shared by all and owned by no single family, such as water, grazing land and forest produce.

• Nature of community rules:

• They are usually unwritten. People follow them through custom and social pressure, not through courts.
• They give each family secure access to the shared resource.
• They also put duties on every family, for example not over-grazing, helping clean the village tank, or giving labour when it is needed.

5. NCERT cases of community action

• Halma (Bhil tradition, Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh)
• Halma is a custom of the Bhil tribe. When a family or village is in crisis, the community comes together to give unpaid labour to help it.
• The Shivganga movement revived halma for planting trees, digging trenches and water harvesting (collecting and storing rainwater).

• Mahesh Sharma received the Padma Shri in 2019 for this work. The official list gives the field as "Social Work – Tribal Welfare" and the state as Madhya Pradesh [8].

• Community kitchens, Chennai floods (2015): residents cooked and served food to flood-hit people when normal supplies broke down.

• Kamal Parmar, Ahmedabad: runs free evening classes and gives dinner to about 150 street children. This shows one person building a community of care.
• Residents' Welfare Associations (RWAs): these are a new, urban type of community. They make their own rules on parking, cleanliness, security and use of common spaces.
• Interdependence of communities:
• An RWA cannot work alone. It depends on traders for supplies and on municipal workers for garbage collection and water.
• No community is self-sufficient, so larger rules are needed that link many communities.

6. Bridge to government: when the law recognises community rules

• Elinor Ostrom's idea:
• Ostrom was an American political scientist. In Governing the Commons (1990) she showed that shared resources such as forests and irrigation systems can be managed well by the people who use them [7].
• This means community management is a working alternative, not only state control or private ownership [7].

• She shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Oliver Williamson and was the first woman to win it [7].

• Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA)

• Full name: The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 [2].
• Community forest resource (CFR) means customary common forest land within a village's traditional boundaries. For pastoral (herding) communities, it covers the land they use by season. It can include reserved forests, protected forests, sanctuaries and national parks that the community traditionally used [2].
• Section 3(1)(i) gives the right to "protect, regenerate or conserve or manage" any community forest resource that the community has traditionally protected for sustainable use [2].
• The gram sabha (the assembly of all adult voters of a village) starts the process. It receives claims, checks them and prepares maps of the claimed areas [3].
• Evidence of CFR can include nistar rights (customary local use of forest produce), traditional grazing grounds and fishing grounds [2].

• Data: 23.43 lakh land titles covering over 1.8 crore acres had been distributed under FRA up to 31 October 2023 [4].

• PESA, 1996

• Full name: The Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 [5]. It extends the panchayat system to Scheduled Areas, which are tribal-majority areas listed under the Fifth Schedule [5].
• Powers given to the gram sabha or panchayat [6]:
  • ownership of minor forest produce (non-timber forest items such as tendu leaves, honey and bamboo)
  • management of minor water bodies
  • a right to be consulted before land is acquired and before people are resettled
  • the power to stop the loss of tribal land to outsiders and to restore land already lost
  • the power to regulate or ban the sale of liquor
  • control over village markets and over money-lending to Scheduled Tribes
• Gram sabhas also approve village development works and identify the people who should benefit from schemes [6].
• Madhya Pradesh (home of the halma tradition) notified its PESA Rules on Janjatiya Gaurav Divas in 2022 [9].

• Further reading: the panchayati-raj and special-provisions-scheduled-areas notes.

• Why family and community are not enough. This is NCERT's question: "Are some rules unfair?"

• Family and community rules are unwritten, so they can be unequal. Examples are rules based on gender, jāti exclusion, or denying the commons to some families.
• These rules cannot easily bind outsiders or settle disputes between communities, such as an RWA and municipal workers.
• This creates the need for written law that applies to everyone, and for government to enforce it. Section 2 of this topic takes this up.

Prelims Hooks

• Halma: a Bhil tradition of unpaid community labour from the Jhabua region of Madhya Pradesh. It was revived by the Shivganga movement, and Mahesh Sharma received the Padma Shri in 2019 (Social Work – Tribal Welfare) [8].
• The community forest resource right to protect, regenerate, conserve or manage forests is in Section 3(1)(i) of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 [2].
• Under FRA, the gram sabha, not the forest department, starts the process of deciding forest rights [3].
• PESA 1996 gives gram sabhas or panchayats ownership of minor forest produce in Fifth Schedule Areas [6].
• Trap: PESA applies to Fifth Schedule areas, not Sixth Schedule (North-East autonomous district council) areas [5].
• Elinor Ostrom wrote Governing the Commons (1990) and won the 2009 Economics Nobel as the first woman to do so [7].
• Community rules over commons (water, grazing land, forest produce) are usually unwritten. They give families secure access but also put duties on them.
• Match the NCERT case to its place: Shalini → Kerala (Onam); Tenzing → Meghalaya; Kamal Parmar → Ahmedabad; community kitchens → Chennai floods 2015.

Mains Points

• Community vs state management of commons: Ostrom's work [7], together with FRA's community forest resource rights [2] and PESA's gram sabha powers [6], supports subsidiarity, the idea that decisions should be made at the lowest level able to make them. Weak points in practice are the slow recognition of community claims and the resistance of forest bureaucracies.
• Social capital as a governance resource: halma, community kitchens and RWAs show that people often act before or alongside the state in a crisis. Disaster management and Jal Shakti-style water programmes can build on such networks.
• Limits of custom: unwritten family and jāti rules may discriminate by gender or caste. Constitutional law and government are needed to protect the individual's rights inside the group. This is the reason the state exists alongside family and community.
• Joint to nuclear shift: a weaker family safety net raises demand for state support, such as elderly care, crèches and social security. This is a policy trade-off for a fast-urbanising India.