In 1908, the Madras Government approved of certain proposals made by the Collector of Ganjam for utilising the services of the Kondhs in the conservancy of the forests in the Pondakhol Agency. The following is a summary of these proposals. [157] The chief difficulty to be contended against in Pondakhol is podu cultivation. This cultivation is not only devastating the hill tops and upper slopes, which should be kept well covered to preserve water for the upper reaches of the Rushikulya river, the chief source of irrigation in Ganjam, but is also the origin of most of the forest fires that rage throughout Pondakhol in the hot weather. The District Forest Officer, in discussing matters with the Kondhs, was told by some of the villagers that they would forego poduing if they had cattle to plough the lands in the plains and valleys. The supply of buffaloes would form the compensation for a right relinquished. The next aim should be to give the people work in the non-cultivation season, which is from the middle of January to the middle of July. This luckily coincides with the fire season. There is an abundance of useful work that the Kondhs can be engaged in, e.g., rendering the demarcation lines permanent, making fire lines, constructing roads, and building inspection sheds. The question arises as to how the Khonds should be repaid for their labour. Money is of little use to them in this out-of-the-way part of the country, and, if they got it, they would probably go to Surada to get drunk on it. It would be better to pay them in food-grain and cloths, and for this purpose departmental shops, and a regular system of accounts, such as are in force among the Chenchus in Kurnool, would be necessary.
In the course of a lament over the change which has come over the Kondhs who live in the range of hills near Berhampore, Mr. S. P. Rice writes as follows. [158] "Here they live in seclusion and in freedom, but also in the lowest depths of squalor and poverty. Once they loved gay colours. True Khond dresses, both male and female, are full of stripes and patterns, in blue, yellow, and red. Where has gone the love of colour? Instead of the long waistcloth ending in tails of blue and red, the man binds about him a wretched rag that can hardly be called a garment. Once the women took a delight in decking themselves with flowers, and a pride in the silver ornaments that jangled on their naked breasts. Where are now the grasses that adorned them, and the innocence that allowed them to go clothed only to the waist? Gone! withered by the blast of the breath of a 'superior civilization.' Gone are the hairpins of sambur bone--an inestimable treasure in the eyes of the true hill Khond. Gone are the floral decorations, and the fantastic head-dresses, which are the pride of the mountain tribes. In dull, unromantic squalor our Khond lives, moves, and has his being; arid, ever as he moves, is heard the clanking upon his wrists of the fetters of his debt. Yet for all that he is happy." The hairpins referred to above are made from sambur (deer: Cervus unicolor) bones, and stuck in the hair of male Kondhs. Porcupine quills are sometimes used by them as hairpins.