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By Impact News Point | Chaibasa, West Singhbhum | March 2026
CHAIBASA Every Tuesday morning, before the mist has fully lifted from the Saranda forest range, Laxmi Leyangi picks up her baskets and walks to the market. She has been doing this for as long as she can remember. Her mother did it before her. Her grandmother before that. The Mangla-Haat of Chaibasa named for Mangalvaar, the Hindi word for Tuesday, the day on which it has always been held, is not a market that anyone founded on a specific date or launched with a government announcement. It grew, the way all living things grow, from need and habit and the particular character of the people who built it. The Ho tribe of West Singhbhum, who have inhabited the Kolhan region for centuries and successfully resisted Mughal, Maratha, and early British encroachment to preserve their forest homeland, created the haat as the centre of their economic and social world. It remains that today.
Laxmi Leyangi, Parbhu Kandaiburu, Mangta Soy, Somai Jarika, and Somwari Kui are among the traders who form the backbone of Chaibasa’s weekly haat. In a market where the majority of shops are run by women, they are not exceptional, they are the norm. The stalls they set up each Tuesday carry fresh vegetables grown in the forest fringe villages of West Singhbhum, dry fish, clay pots, bamboo baskets, mahua flowers, honey collected from sal forest trees, rice beer brewed at home, handwoven cloth, and spices. What visitors notice first, arriving from any modern market in Ranchi or Jamshedpur, is the absence of plastic. There is almost none. Goods are measured, weighed, and handed over wrapped in the broad leaves of the sal tree Shorea robusta, the sacred tree that defines the Kolhan landscape and the spiritual life of the Ho people who live within it. The sal leaf is not a heritage affectation or an environmental gesture. It is simply how this market has always worked, because the sal tree has always been here and plastic has not.
West Singhbhum district, of which Chaibasa is the headquarters, is the largest district in Jharkhand by area. According to the 2011 census, 67.31 percent of its population belongs to Scheduled Tribe communities, a proportion higher than Jharkhand’s own substantial tribal average and far above the national figure. The sex ratio of 1,005 females per 1,000 males is also higher than both the Jharkhand average of 949 and the national average of 940. The demographics of the haat reflect the demographics of the district: the market is majority Ho, with smaller numbers of Munda, Oraon, Santhal, Gond, and Bhumij traders joining on each Tuesday. The Ho are the fourth largest of Jharkhand’s 32 tribal groups, speaking a language from the Austroasiatic family closely related to Mundari and more distantly related to languages as far as Khmer and Mon in Southeast Asia. They are, in the classification of ethnolinguists, one of the oldest continuing communities of the Indian subcontinent.
The Ho people’s relationship with the Singhbhum forests is not metaphorical. It is economic, spiritual, and constitutional. Archaeological findings from the wider Singhbhum region include iron slag and pottery fragments carbon-dated to around 1400 BCE, and excavations at Benisagar approximately 75 kilometres from Chaibasa uncovered temple remains and sculptures indicating continuous habitation from the 5th to the 16th century CE. The haats of this region are therefore not 300 years old in the sense of a founding date. They are expressions of a trading tradition embedded in communities whose roots in this land predate most of the institutional structures that the modern state has built around them. The British, when they formally established Singhbhum district with Chaibasa as its headquarters in 1837 after their conquest of Kolhan, found the haat system already operating. They taxed it, formalised it into their revenue systems under the said levy on market exchanges, and inadvertently documented its existence and vitality in their own administrative records. The market was not made by the British. It predated them. They simply wrote it down.
The trading system inside the Chaibasa Mangla-Haat operates on principles that have no formal name in economics textbooks but that any trader in the market will explain immediately if asked. The dominant structure is the Bhaga System, a division of products into equal parts in which small and middle-class merchants sell at fixed rates. The everyday essentials of life in West Singhbhum: fresh vegetables, spices, rice, lentils, pulses are traded under this system at prices that are consistently lower than what the same goods cost in the permanent shops and supermarkets of Jamshedpur or Ranchi. This is not charity. It is the consequence of eliminating the intermediary. The woman who grew the vegetables in Noamundi walks to Chaibasa on Tuesday and sells them directly to the family that will cook them that evening. There is no distributor, no wholesaler, no cold chain, no logistics company, and no margin extracted at each link. The price is lower because the chain is shorter. This has been the economic logic of the haat for as long as it has existed, and it is the reason that 98 percent of rural people who have access to a haat prefer to buy their essential goods there, according to research by the Rural Marketing Association of India.
What the market sells tells you everything about how the people of West Singhbhum live and what the Saranda forest means to them. Minor Forest Produce, the collective name for the non-timber goods that tribal communities collect from forests occupies a significant portion of every haat stall. Mahua flowers, used for brewing, cooking oil production, and food; kendu leaves, used for bidi rolling; honey harvested from wild beehives in the sal trees; tamarind; lac; and dozens of other products whose names are known only in the languages of the communities that collect them. The Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India estimates that 60 to 70 percent of the income of forest-dwelling tribal communities across India comes from the collection and sale of minor forest produce, and that this trade flows through approximately 5,000 village haats across the country’s forest belt. Jharkhand, with its combination of dense forest cover and large tribal population, sits at the centre of that economy. The haat is not peripheral to Jharkhand’s tribal economic life. It is the institution through which that life is organised.
TRIFED has also documented the darker side of that economy. The majority of existing haats across India’s tribal belt, it notes, are unorganised; they lack oversight systems and institutional mechanisms for fair trading. In this unregulated space, middlemen routinely capture value that should reach the producers. A tribal woman who collects honey from the Saranda forest and brings it to the Chaibasa haat receives a fraction of the price that the same honey commands in an urban market after the intermediary has handled it. TRIFED’s estimate is that tribal MFP gatherers typically receive less than 20 percent of the value of their produce once it travels beyond the haat to urban markets. The haat is simultaneously the institution that sustains these communities and the point in the supply chain where they are most vulnerable to exploitation. It is both their strength and their limitation.
The Palash brand launched by the Jharkhand State Livelihood Promotion Society now selling tribally sourced forest products at 46 Palash Mart retail outlets across the state is the most deliberate attempt yet to change that equation. Mahua Ladoos, honey, bamboo handicrafts, and Kendu leaf products from SHG-linked tribal collectors now reach urban consumers under a branded label at prices that return a larger share to the producer. The alignment between the haat’s traditional role and Palash’s contemporary model is intentional: JSLPS did not try to replace the haat but to extend its value chain beyond it. The Chaibasa Mangla-Haat produces; Palash markets. The producer gets more. That is the theory. Whether the 2 lakh tribal women currently earning through Palash activities represents a transformation of the haat economy or a supplement to it is a question the programme’s scale will answer over the next five years.
The haat is also a political institution, and this function has not diminished with time. In 2020, when the government announced plans to impose municipal administration on Lupungguttu village in West Singhbhum, the villagers did not file a petition or hold a press conference. They gathered at the weekly haat. Rajshree Purty, a female resident of Lupungguttu, told researchers that imposing municipality on Fifth Schedule tribal land was against the constitutional provisions of the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 PESA which gives Gram Sabhas in Scheduled Areas authority over the use and management of their own land and resources. The haat, which is a Gram Sabha institution as much as a market, became the venue for this legal and political resistance. The distinction between the market, the village assembly, and the governing body of a tribal community is not sharp in the Ho tradition. The haat serves all three functions because it is the one weekly gathering that every member of the community attends.
The Jharkhand government’s stated position on tribal haats is supportive. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs has identified haat modernisation as a priority under several central schemes providing platforms, sheds, toilets, electricity, drinking water, and parking at existing haats to improve the conditions under which trading takes place. TRIFED specifically recommends establishing 50 metric tonne godowns at block level, linked to two or three modernised haats each, so that aggregated MFP stocks can be transported to cold storage and urban markets efficiently. Jharkhand has received central funds under the MSP for MFP scheme to support this modernisation. The progress on the ground, as with so much Jharkhand infrastructure, has been uneven. The Chaibasa Mangla-Haat operates without a permanent covered structure, in the open, which means the women who walk from Noamundi and Goilkera to sell their produce sit in the sun in April and in the rain in July. The haat survives this not because conditions are adequate but because the alternative of not attending is economically unacceptable.
A market that has existed for centuries, that was documented by British colonial administrators as operating before their own arrival, that resisted the disruption of COVID-19 and resumed the moment restrictions lifted, that is simultaneously a food market, a craft market, a forest produce market, a political assembly, and a women’s economic space, is not fragile. It is one of the most resilient institutions in Jharkhand. What threatens it is not the internet or the mall or the mobile grocery app though all three are arriving in West Singhbhum. What threatens it is the slow erosion of the forest from which its most important products come, the suppression of tribal land rights that removes the constitutional basis for the Gram Sabha’s authority over the haat itself, and the continued failure to stop middlemen from extracting the value that belongs to the women sitting in rows on Tuesday mornings in Chaibasa, selling honey and mahua and clay pots wrapped in sal leaves, in a market that their grandmothers also attended, and whose grandmothers did too.
SOURCE LOG
Laxmi Leyangi, Parbhu Kandaiburu, Mangta Soy, Somai Jarika, Somwari Kui named traders Chaibasa Haat; majority of stalls run by women; Ho tribe dominant traders in Chaibasa Haat; Munda/Oraon/Santhal/Gond/Bhumij also present in smaller numbers; Ho tribe 4th largest of 32 tribal groups Jharkhand; Bhaga System equal division fixed rates; goods given in sal leaves; no plastic in haat; dry fish/clay pots/bamboo/rice beer/mahua/honey products; Mangla-Haat named for Tuesday; market is main income source for tribals; majority female stall owners; economic engine local and regional growth: The Voices / Media Lit India, “The Traditional Haat Bazaar of Chaibasa,” June 14, 2021, medialit.in/thevoices/the-traditional-haat-bazaar-of-chaibasa
Haat as instrument of indigenous media; Jharkhand supplier of vegetables to Asansol/Patna/Rourkela/Bokaro/Jamshedpur; Ho community agrarian society; daily needs fulfilled by taluka Haat bazaars; West Singhbhum densely populated Ho tribe; 2020 Lupungguttu haat political gathering to oppose municipality imposition; Rajshree Purty PESA Fifth Schedule constitutional rights argument; haat serves as Gram Sabha institution: IJTSRD Motilal Tirkey et al., “Haat: An instrument of cultural, social, economic and political life of Ho tribal community in West Singhbhum, Jharkhand,” January-February 2023, ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd52826.pdf
West Singhbhum 67.31% Scheduled Tribe population; sex ratio 1,005 females per 1,000 males; district largest by area in Jharkhand; bordered south by Keonjhar/Mayurbhanj/Sundergarh Odisha; iron slag/pottery carbon-dated ~1400 BCE; Benisagar excavations 5th-16th century CE; Ho people’s presence in Singhbhum documented from 17th century when they overcame the Bhuiyas; British conquest of Kolhan 1837; Chaibasa district headquarters constituted 1837; municipality recognition 1875: West Singhbhum District official website chaibasa.nic.in/history | Wikipedia West Singhbhum district | Wikipedia Chaibasa | Wikipedia Ho people
Ho language Austroasiatic family related to Mundari and distantly to Khmer/Mon; Warang Citi script; dialects Lohara/Chaibasa/Thakurmunda; Mage Parab/Baa Parab festival cycle; Singbonga creator god; sal tree central to Ho cultural and economic life; copper smelted Singhbhum 9th-12th centuries; Ho resistance 1831-33 Kol uprising against tax imposition; Hos fought Rajas of Chota Nagpur states 18th century to retain independence; Mughal/Maratha non-entry into Kolhan documented: Tribal Welfare Research Institute Jharkhand “Ho,” trijharkhand.in/en/ho | Wikipedia Ho people
TRIFED: 60-70% income forest dwellers from MFP; approx 5,000 village haats in India’s forest belt for MFP trade; Rs 20,000 crore trade value 55 economically important MFPs; haats largely unorganised, lack oversight mechanisms; middlemen capture value tribal MFP gatherer receives less than 20% of produce value; MSP for MFP scheme haat modernisation with platforms/sheds/godowns; 50 MT godown per block level linked to 2-3 haats: TRIFED “Infrastructure: Haats and Warehouses,” trifed.tribal.gov.in/non/timber/haat-warehouse
98% rural people with haat access prefer to buy essential goods there; India 47,000 haats Rs 50,000 crore annual sales; haat as rural hypermarket concept; stall preferences agricultural products dominant: RMAI/ResearchGate “Role of Haats in the Development of Rural Markets,” researchgate.net/publication/345806613Palash JSLPS 46 Palash Marts; 2 lakh SHG women earning through Palash; mahua ladoos/honey/bamboo handicrafts from tribal collectors; supply chain from forest to urban consumer without intermediary: JSLPS Palash page jslps.in/Palash.aspx | Ministry of Tribal Affairs Knowledge Repository “PALASH: Branding and Marketing for Rural and Tribal Women Entrepreneurs,” November 28 2025, knowledge.tribal.gov.in
