Exploring the Site-specific Well-being-based Quality of Life Among the Indigenous Agrarian Community in Indian Sundarban Biosphere Reserve: A Cross-sectional Mixed Method Approach

Abstract

Using a cross-sectional survey design with a mixed-method approach and a multi-stage random sampling procedure, this study measured the well-being-based, site-specific Quality of Life Index (QoLI) among 300 Indigenous agrarian households across 12 representative rural villages located within different adaptation zones of the Indian Sundarban Biosphere Reserve, a fragile, agriculture-based region in Southeast Asia. However, none of the studies focused on the well-being-based site-specific quality of life among the entire tribal communities in this fragile ecosystem. Human capital index, physical capital index, financial capital index and housing index are the four main dimensions that make up the QoLI. Twenty-seven indicators that are connected to the four dimensions of QoLI have been chosen for this study. By lowering the dimensionality of the data set, principal component analysis was used to find and examine the major causes of QoLI. The four QoLI dimensions show spatial variation between villages. The Shyamnagar village from the Kultali community development (CD) block received the lowest level of QoLI. On the other hand, the highest level of QoLI was received in Katamari village from Kultali CD block (moderate adaptation zone). A low level of concentration of QoLI (<0.300) has been found in two villages, namely Gangasagar from Sagar CD block (low adaptation zone) and Shyamnagar from Kultali CD block (moderate adaptation zone). On the other hand, a high level of concentration of quality-of-life status (>0.32) has been found in six villages, namely Khasramkarerchak, Palpur, Tetultala, Chanpali Abad, Katamari and Gabbaria. By implementing the necessary policies, regional planners and policymakers can use these findings to help transform villages with extremely low and low quality of life into areas with moderate to high quality of life. The approach adopted in this study can be effectively implemented at various scales in other regions of India and other lower-middle-income countries.