Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: Making Place for Rural

Development by Pratyusha Basu

Description

India’s cooperative dairying program is widely celebrated as an example of successful rural

development, yet the meanings of this success have been understood mainly through the
pronouncements of national and international development agencies. Within such official
narratives, there has been relatively little engagement with the geographies of dairy development,
both its place-specific productions through political contests, availabilities of labor, and
distributions of agricultural resources, and the unevenness of its outcomes across rural India.
This absence is even more surprising given that village-level cooperatives comprise the
foundation of India’s dairy development program, and the work of women within rural
households is continuously invoked as an integral part of the dairy work.

This book extends and enriches current understandings of cooperative dairying in India to show
both its value to rural communities as well as the limitations of its participatory structures.
Combining comparative and ethnographic approaches, explanations for the diverse outcomes of
cooperative dairying are provided from the perspective of the people and places directly involved
in the everyday reproductions of rural development. The two villages at the center of the book––
one in the state of Gujarat in western India where the cooperative model of dairy development
originated and the other in the state of Madhya Pradesh in central India where cooperative
dairying was replicated––are examples of how to overcome the success/failure binary in existing
evaluations of dairy development.

This book contributes to existing understandings of rural development and rural geographies in
four significant ways. First, by following histories of development from their local origins to
their national and international appearances, the global genealogies that are usually attached to
development are rendered more complex. Second, by connecting cooperatives to place, the ways
in which participation in development reflects local struggles for power and, hence, are
structured through local inequalities, is revealed. Third, by linking dairying and agriculture, the
continuing importance of resource distributions in shaping the outcomes of rural development is
highlighted. Finally, the crucial role of household divisions of labor in the success of village
dairy cooperatives is explicated through showing how struggles over the meanings of rural
women’s work become key to enabling household-level participation in dairying.

This book provides an appreciation of the many meanings of being rural in the contemporary
context by emphasizing place-based diversities in the unfolding of rural development and
highlighting differences within and between rural places. Given that the future of rural places is
constantly shadowed by announcements of the impending urbanization of the world, it is useful
to reflect on the ways in which rural places neither accede to the erasure of their distinctiveness
nor remain disconnected from the wider global economy. Overall, this book represents a
renewed interest in grassroots approaches to poverty alleviation, showing how local communities
work toward ensuring the viability of their livelihood options.

This book is of interest to scholars in a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields,
including geography, sociology, anthropology, rural studies, development studies, gender
studies, and regional studies of India.