Podu is a traditional system of cultivation used by tribes in India, whereby different areas of jungle forest are cleared by burning each year to provide land for crops.
Since the 1930s, there have been attempts to restrict its use in order to conserve forests and permit growth of commercial tree species such as teak.
One reason for the difference in treatment, whereby the system is tolerated in areas such as Srikakulam but its practitioners have been forcibly evicted in Adilabad, is that the people in some districts are relatively docile and have not risen up, with the encouragement of Naxalite insurgents, against outside interference as they have elsewhere.
[3] Ethnologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf has noted that, at least in some areas, the podu system also carried implied land rights.
He noted that over the period 1941–1979, which were the occasions of his academic field-work, forest officials had introduced restrictions on use but that these were not as onerous in some places as in others, and that in villages with little flat land there were none at all.