Sarkar in the Backyard

State-Fabrication in a Watershed Project in Kalahandi

Sailen Routray and N. Shantha Mohan

Dokarichanchara Valley in Koksara, Kalahandi
Photo Credit - commons.wikimedia.org

 

It is two thirty in the afternoon of the month of jyestha, and one of the authors is sitting in a tiny stand-alone room with naked, non-plastered brick walls in the village of Mahulpani that houses the office of the Sanjore Micro-Watershed Development Committee, a village-level institution set up under the aegis of the Odisha Watershed Development Mission (OWDM) that implements the Western Odisha Orissa Rural Livelihoods Project (WORLP). 

There is a crowd of women belonging to self-help groups sitting just outside the door of the room. Inside the room, a couple of middle-level staff of the project are trying to prepare business development plans (BDPs) for dozens of largely illiterate project beneficiaries who have already taken grants and bought goats for farming. The secretary of the committee rushes into the room and tells me, ‘Asantu, bhauja jagichhi’ (‘Please come, my wife is waiting’).

This is a call for having lunch at his place. But he pointedly ignores the project staff who must also be hungry, who have no other way of getting lunch in the village so late in the afternoon and who had indicated to the secretary the previous day that they would want him to make arrangements for lunch. The author feels a little awkward, but feeling that flight is the better part of valour, leaves the room for lunch.

This incident from fieldwork done in Kalahandi in western Odisha raises a set of important questions. First, why did the BDPs need to be created at all after the distribution of grants when they should have been made before the event a long time back? How is it that most of the grantees have been able to buy goats when goats are officially seen as ‘the bane’ of watershed development projects in India? How is it that a lower-level project functionary is able to defy his seniors by withdrawing even the basic courtesies of village society, such as offering food, that too in public? In short, how has the workings of government and the process of state fabrication changed by the mushrooming of missions in India over the last twenty-five years or so?

 

In this essay, we deal with something related yet much smaller in scope. Based on fieldwork conducted over the period January 2009 to February 2010 in the site of a new-generation participatory governmental watershed-plus development project called Western Orissa Rural Livelihoods Project (WORLP) in the district of Kalahandi in western Odisha, we argue that the emergent forms of state fabrication in India associated with the establishment of missions involves the creation of new institutional assemblages that incorporate organizations and institutions earlier seen as lying outside the body of the state (such as non-governmental organizations [NGOs] and community-based organizations [CBOs]) into the body of the state.

The WORLP is a DFID (Department of International Development)–funded watershed development project for livelihoods development being implemented by the Orissa State Watershed Development Mission. In the district of Kalahandi, the project is being implemented by 6 project implementing agencies (PIAs) in six developmental blocks out of which three are NGOs. Each PIA oversees the work of ten village-level micro-watershed development committees that are societies set up under the Indian Societies Registration Act of 1860, and these committees undertake the actual work of the project in the villages. They have a president and a secretary and constitute of committee members representing the various population groups and hamlets in the villages.

Thus the creation of these village-level institutions (that are technically societies or NGOs) is one of the ways in which the state has extended and morphed itself in the ground. This helps the governmental apparatus to reach deep into hitherto marginal rural areas and population groups, with important impacts on the ground regarding the functioning of the state and the way it is experienced by people. 

In particular, we tease out one aspect of this morphing of the state on the ground involving increasing convergence in the workings and everyday practices of the governmental and non-governmental organizations. This convergence can be seen in terms of the profile of the staff and in the organizational culture and strategy. I argue that instead of positing additional domains of sociality such as political society, formulations such as ‘state in society’ might be more relevant in understanding such processes of change.

 

Growth of the Missions and Quotidian Modes of State Fabrication

Most narratives surrounding the state in India posit decolonization in the period 1947–52 as the phase that marked a clear shift in the working of the state and in the workings of Indian politics. In contrast to this, I argue that we can locate a major shift around the mid-1980s regarding the way in which the ‘government is done’ in India. 

Immediately after decolonization, the state inherited a colonial administrative structure that consisted of line departments for administrative work. In this structure, development administration became another arm of the state. This continued till the 1980s, when significant changes started taking place.

We claim that till this period, state fabrication in India happened in the ‘symbolic mode’ in which the state remained at a distance with respect to village society despite the rapid expansion of the bureaucratic apparatus, and the state had a dominantly coercive intent. In contrast to this, the last two and half decades or so have seen state fabrication in, what we call, the ‘quotidian mode’, which has seen the governmental apparatus reaching deep into hitherto marginal areas and population groups. 

Over this period, much governmental work, such as in the sectors of health, education and watershed development, has been routed through para-state organizations. These organizations are called missions and are often societies registered under the Indian Societies Registration Act of 1860. These operate at the level of both the state and central government, and have a target-driven approach towards achieving policy goals within pre-set time frames.

Missions such as the various state and district Watershed Development Missions allow for new institutional assemblages based on the avowed principles of participation and decentralization. This has also involved a growing shift from focusing on ‘scientific’ technologies to ‘social’ technologies of statecraft, for example, in the field of water resources, the shift has been from an almost exclusive focus on big dams that were fits of engineering to watershed development and innovations in ‘social technology’ such as watershed development committees and self-help groups. 

This is true of other sectors such as health and education as well where missions increasingly undertake activities that were earlier performed by government departments in addition to new kinds of programmatic and social interventions. Organizational forms traditionally seen as part of civil society (such as NGOs) are increasingly being incorporated into the ambit of the state through projectization in the missions.

Theoretically, the most sophisticated account of such processes of multiplication of technologies of governmentality and the simultaneous morphing of the state has been those surrounding political society (Chatterjee 2006 [2004]). In this formulation, Chatterjee argues that the domain of negotiation and claim-making with the state that the various subaltern social groups engage with maps out on the terrain of political society, the domain of civil society being the preserve of rights-bearing ‘citizens’.

In an article published in Economic and Political Weekly, Chatterjee extends this formulation by borrowing from Kalyan Sanyal’s recent work on primitive accumulation (Chatterjee 2008). He tries to account for the proliferation of various governmental technologies (that he identifies as ameliorative) by making it a part of a broader narrative of capital in which governments try to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation by welfare programmes that support lives and livelihoods. 

He argues that social agents in the domain of civil society are a part of the narrative of corporate capital, whereas social agents in the domain of political society are part of the narrative of non-corporate capital. He further posits that relatively successful contestation and claim-making by such agents has happened primarily within an urban setting (ibid.).

Such an argument has been criticized for setting up unhelpful binaries, for disguising welfare colonialism as a measure for offsetting dispossession and for characterizing civil society as the domain of legality and hegemony when apparently it should be read as a domain characterized by domination (Baviskar and Sundar 2008). 

Doubts have also been expressed about the newness of such a formulation, the conflation of welfare intentions with outcomes, which is overtly economistic in nature (John and Deshpande 2008). It has also been pointed out that this reading of the post-1990 social change in rural India has an exclusive focus on class as an axis of power, is riddled with a few factual inaccuracies and glosses over of the abdication of the arena of governance by the state (Shah 2008).

This formulation and its critiques reproduce a certain tendency in the social sciences in India that tend to reify the state. At the same time, there has also been a simultaneous lack of ethnographic engagement with the apparatus of the state in India.  The dominant strands of scholarship on the state in India have focused on the ‘nature’ of the Indian state and have displaced questions surrounding the state into the realm of the politics. There is a need to ethnographically interrogate the actual practices of state fabrication on the ground.

Over the last two decades, the work of scholars such as James Manor, Paul Brass, Akhil Gupta, Barbara Harris-White, Robert Wade and Jonathan Parry has had the state itself as an object of study and analysis by focusing on the way by various omissions and commissions of the state play out on the ground, and the way such actions are seen, experienced, and commented on by people (Fuller and Harriss 2000: 10–14).  

We locate our argument within this broader anthropologically oriented literature that takes the state itself as an object of study. We try and understand morphings of the state on the ground by using ethnographic methods that interrogate the shifts in the workings of the state that have been concomitant with the incorporation of civil society organizations into the body of the state. This helps fill in a gap in literature as similarities or differences between governmental and non-governmental organizations have generally been constructed around their effects (Kamat 2002).

We locate this work within a broadly defined ‘state-in-society’ approach as developed by Joel S. Migdal (2001) that sees the state as a field of power that has a paradoxical nature having the image of a clearly bounded, unified organization, on the one hand, and of fragmentary everyday practices, on the other. Because of its focus on both practices and images, this approach allows us to focus on process rather than on outcomes. 

Such an approach also helps us shift the focus from Marxist ideas of hegemony or liberal ideas of consensus to the actual messiness of everyday morphings of state and society on the ground. As the state-in-society approach does not see the state as a fixed ideological entity, it helps us map out the actual morphings of the state on the ground as it comes into contact with various social forces and, in turn, accommodates different ethical orders and logics (ibid.).

Increasing Convergence in Everyday Practice between GOs and NGOs

In this section, we follow a broadly defined state-in-society approach to understand the morphings of the state on the ground. In the first sub-section, we show how the growth of the mission mode of ‘doing government’ has led to changes in everyday practices of governmental organizations (GOs). In the two subsequent sub-sections, using the tropes of provisionalization of the state and pluralization of the logics of the state, I show how the incorporation of civil society organizations into the body of the state is reflected in its morphings on the ground. In the final sub-section, I bring in the experiences of villagers as they perceive and experience this convergence between GOs and NGOs.

 

The Case of a Review Meeting

Within the first month or so of starting fieldwork in Kalahandi, one of the authors had occasion to attend a monthly review meeting of one of the government PIAs in the district, and accompanied the PIA from his place of residence to the office. On the day of the meeting, the PIA left home at around ten in the morning when the meeting itself was scheduled around ten-thirty. The PIA at that point of time was Mr Kundu.

It took nearly 90 minutes to clear a 35 km stretch of a National Highway, and the PIA’s car reached the office around 11.45 am. By that time, a large number of the staff, around twenty in number, has arrived, but not everyone has come. So the meeting does not start immediately. The mood is raucous. There are people milling around, joking, staff of the opposite sex flirting with each other and guys horsing around. It comes off as something of a shock. It does not feel like the review meeting of a GO at all. It feels like the experience-sharing workshop of some middle-sized grass-roots NGO. By the time everyone arrives and the meeting starts, it is around 12.00 pm. The attendance is more or less full, and there is a shortage of chairs.

This is another feature of review meetings of the watershed mission. In every meeting, there seems to be a shortage of chairs. Everyone complains about it, but no one seems to want to do anything about it. Because of the shortage of chairs, a couple of people sit on the window ledge. And the meeting then starts in earnest. First, attendance is taken in an informal manner. Two of the important project staff, an Livelihood Support Team and a Watershed Development Team member, seems to be on leave from the WORLP project.

Just before the meeting starts, the PIA Mr Kundu goes out to take a call that he receives on his mobile phone. In the meantime, everyone starts talking about the strike that they had in February 2009. Before starting fieldwork looking at the work of the watershed mission in Kalahandi a scoping exercise was done regarding the work of the district administration in Kalahandi towards the beginning of fieldwork. 

On one of the visits to the Kalahandi District Collectorate, one of the authors saw a group of people sitting in a dharna (a sit-in demonstration) in front of the gate of the collector’s office with its representatives giving rousing speeches. It was the district-level WDT staff agitating for better salaries and permanence of work. Later with informal interactions with the PIAs, it came out that they in fact sympathized with most of the demands of the staff, but some demands, especially that of being made permanent, were seen as a little unrealistic. 

By the time of the review meeting being discussed, the strike had been withdrawn and things had settled down. In fact, a large number of the staff had not participated in the strike. Now a large part of the conversation in the absence of Mr. Kundu in the room was about whether the salaries of those who participated in the strike and did not report for work would be deducted or not.

One of the most surprising things was the way the lunch was conducted. Food for everyone was ordered from a restaurant close by. Those who wanted vegetarian food had to specify their order. Most people preferred and ordered non-vegetarian food. Dheeraj, one WDT member, took the responsibility of getting the meals to the office. Two of the other staff also went with him to help him. 

It took Dheeraj a long time to get back. By the time he returned, the meeting was about to get over and he had missed most of the meeting. The review was almost over when he reached, and with the arrival of food, everyone started getting fidgety and things were wrapped up soon.

Since there were no tables and there was a shortage of chairs, all of us sat on the ground and started eating. After ten minutes or so, the PIA and the other officer also came out of the PIA’s room and started having lunch with everyone present. There was pleasant banter between the PIA and the staff; he was pleasantly needling those who had participated in the strike. The latter were ribbing him about getting paid for the days on which they had struck work on the grounds that after the strike, they had worked overtime and had achieved the targets for the month.

There was little of the overall symbolism of hierarchy that supposedly operates in most government organizations. The PIA had got the same meal packet as everyone else, and he also joined the others in having food sitting on the floor when he could easily have had food in his room on the table. The preceding description indicates a convergence of the organizational cultures of GOs and NGOs, with GOs increasingly adopting the organizational culture of how NGOs are supposed to function.

Provisionalization of the State

Although states are as contingent as any other social artifact, the myth of the state is generally sustained by a certain imperative to portray itself as a permanent entity that lies above society. The state is seen as an agent of change but not necessarily as a temporal artifact. In most small towns and cities in India, the state is made visible and available to the population by its material body, primarily offices. 

In most small cities and towns and till very recently in most big cities, government offices of various kinds ranging from the post office to the police barracks provided the landmarks around which people laid out a map of their everyday lives and experiences. Often directions would be given with some government office in mind.

But in WORLP, only the office of the project director is a semi-permanent office, since it has been rented out from another governmental body. The offices of the block-level PIAs are operated in rented houses, and they frequently shift offices. Although WORLP is a government project, and its project holder the OWDM is a permanent body (a registered society) because of projectization of the watershed development work, there is a thorough casualization of work practices. 

Low-level functionaries are on periodic contracts, although some of them have been serving in various watershed development projects for nearly ten years now. They don’t experience themselves as straightforward agents of the state. Due to these and other reasons, we argue that provisionalization is one of the modes of fabricating the quotidian state, and  the way in which ‘the state’ is seen and experienced comes to resemble ‘transient’ social actors such as NGOs and CBOs.

Pluralization of the State

Apart from the growing similarities in organizational culture and practices between GOs and NGOs, the state now seems to (a) lend itself to many appropriations on the ground and, therefore, to a certain kind of creative usage by population groups and (b) increasingly uses multiple modalities and logics to justify and make sense of its actions. We identify a few of these logics and the modes of their imbrication.

Participation

Participation provides one kind of logic that is increasingly being deployed to both justify and make sense of governmental action. The discourse over participation originated through the work of the social movements that sought, amongst other things, to expand the scope of citizenship rights (Cornwall and Brock 2005). But increasingly, multilateral agencies and governments are using this as an instrument of governance.

The post-colonial nation-state purportedly drew its legitimacy from two separate yet related modes of operation. The first mode was through the practice of electoral democracy in which the state claimed to represent the nation through the logic of representation. At the same time, it used the language of development to both create and operate on the domain of scientific planning to act upon society at a distance in its symbolic mode of fabrication. A lot of social scientific work on India in particular and the global South in general has focused upon the apparent contradictions between democracy and development.

With the increasing importance of the quotidian mode of state fabrication, there seems to be an attempt to conflate these two logics through governmental technologies associated with participation. For example, in the village-level watershed committees of WORLP tools for enabling participation are created with the logic of representation. Adequate representation various population groups such as women, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is aimed at.

Targeting and bhag

With ‘elite capture’ increasingly framing narratives surrounding such morphings of the state, targeting is another logic that seems to be associated with modes of operation of state power. This is especially so in the field site of WORLP where the population in the project villages has been divided into four discrete groups with households as units—well-off, manageable, poor and very poor. Specific programmatic interventions are then targeted at each of these groups. 

The logic of targeting is premised upon a specific mode of governmentality that partitions people into distinct groups and then makes certain interventions contingent upon the membership of these groups. Participation then makes it possible for such targeting to happen by opening the project to the kind of scrutiny that it would not be subjected to otherwise. 

But targeting does not translate on the ground unmediated. The morphings of the state on the ground also make for the infiltration of vernacular notions of politics into the domain of state action. The vernacular notion of bhag or reasonable share can be seen as one such logic.

The experience of convergence

How the villagers saw the watershed staff did not vary much across the governmental and the NGO PIAs. Although the villagers saw ‘watershed’ as a government project, the way they related to and interacted with the watershed staff was different from their interactions with officials from other government departments.

For example, almost all the members of the various watershed committees had the mobile number of the project director. They were often seen calling up the director even slightly late in the evening and discussing minute details of the work of the micro-watershed. This kind of access to a higher official would not be possible in most line departments and even villagers remark on this. On asking which department’s staff visits their village the most, most villagers invariably reply that it is the ‘watershed’ staff that visits the most.

This familiarity seems to have resulted in contempt for the officials. For example, one often saw functionaries of the micro-watersheds complain about the PIA in a roundabout fashion to the Project Director when the same PIA has been around. Villagers do see ‘watershed’ as a government project, and they also act in a familiar fashion with the staff of the watershed mission. 

Thus, although the staff of the watershed mission were perceived and responded to differently from the response meted out to other line departments, there were significant similarities between the ways in which the staff of the GO and NGO PIA were dealt with by villagers and village-level functionaries of the project. This experience was characterized by an increasing familiarity between PIA-level and senior-level staff of the district watershed development mission.

***

In the preceding sections of this essay, we discussed the mission mode of ‘doing government’ and the attendant growth of the quotidian mode of state fabrication by looking at just one trope, that of growing convergence between the workings of governmental organizations and non-governmental organizations. We teased out just a few of the aspects of such a process.

We posit this against the narratives surrounding political society that are increasingly becoming influential for understanding social change in the global South. Political society as a concept is of deeper theoretical provenance and can be seen as a mediating category that allowed conversations between the rival schools of political economy and liberalism. The way Chatterjee uses political society is an intervention in the neo-Foucauldian literature on governmentality. 

But what is elided here is the fact that in the Foucauldian schema, although population seems like only an empirical category, it is in some sense a ‘residue’ of the theoretical enterprise of trying to understand the operations of disciplinary power. But Chatterjee takes population to be a more or less empirical category, and then makes an attempt at explaining how the politics of population groups congeal into the domain of political society.

Based on the discussions in the preceding sections, we argue that the understanding of the politics of population groups and the way they make claims and act upon the state can be better understood by trying to unpack the morphings within the body of the state. In our case, as already mentioned, this seems to be happening through the convergence of various types of organizations. To understand such a process, a state-in-society approach seems to be better suited as it is theoretically less overdetermined and allows us to make legible the messiness of everyday practice.

References

 

Baviskar, Amita and Nandini Sundar. 2008. ‘Democracy versus Economic Transformation?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 43(46): 87–89.

 

Chatterjee, Partha. 2006 [2004]. Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in most of the World: Delhi and Ranikhet: Permanent Black.

———. 2008a. ‘Democracy and Economic Transformation in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 43 (16): 53–62.

 

Cornwall, Andrea and Karen Brock. 2005. ‘What Do Buzzwords Do for Development Policy? A Critical Look at “Participation”, “Empowerment” and “Poverty Reduction”, Third World Quarterly, 26(7): 1043–1060.

 

Fuller, C.J. and John Harriss. 2000. ‘For an Anthropology of the Modern Indian State’, in C.J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï (eds). 2000. The Everyday State and Society in Modern India. New Delhi: Social Science Press.

 

John, Mary E. and Satish Deshpande. 2008. ‘Theorising the Present: Problems and Possibilities‘,  Economic and Political Weekly, 43(46): 83–86.

Kamat, Sangeeta. 2002. Development Hegemony: NGOs and the State in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

 

Migdal, Joel S. 2001. State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Shah, Mihir. 2008. ‘Structures of Power in Indian Society: A Response’, Economic and Political Weekly, 43(46): 78–83.

Note: All the names used in this essay, apart from the name of the district and the project, are pseudonyms. The latest version of this piece was published as a book chapter in the volume, 'Thinking about Water in Uncertain Times: State People and Conflicts' - a collection of essays on the water sector by Sailen Routray and N Shantha Mohan - published by Aakar Books, New Delhi, in 2020.