The Garos: Struggling to Survive in the Valley of Death

The Garos ‘Struggling to survive in the valley of death’ is the work of a few young law student-researchers of different public universities in the country. It is the outcome of their several months of hard work–desk, library work and field trips to the Garo villages located in the forest of Modhupur and lying at the Garo hills bordering India. We in ELCOP call this program ‘Community Law Reform’ (CLR) directed toward studying and understanding a community and visualize remedies of their existing miseries. CLR initiatives go further our young researchers want to prescribe a few definite measures for community empowerment. Thus ELCOP is engaged in imparting ‘real legal education’ – dealing with real problems of ‘live clients’ as lawyers generally denote, and not confined within the four walls of a law school. This publication is the sixth in a row of annual CLR publications devoted to the socio-economic and historico-political analysis of specific communities–who are for various reasons disempowered, poor, underprivileged and marginalized. ELCOP believes that from among these researchers will grow ‘rebellious lawyers’ whose primary objectives will be to work for empowerment of marginalized communities, transforming the ‘valley of death’ into a ‘garden of rejoice’. Though a work of students, the book may be a useful reading for researchers, social scientists, political scientists, anthropologists, human rights activists and theoreticians and obviously for the students of law.