15 Jan 2006

I should not have trusted my ethnography professor.  She convinced me today that good academic writing should make the researcher visible.  By subscribing to this, I have created an existential crisis for myself: Who am I?

I would like to write about my fondness for butter scotch ice cream and denim kurta, or that my grandmother asks me to get married every time I speak to her.  Unfortunately, in academic writing these are interesting but irrelevant details.  I asked myself what could be relevant and one thumb rule comes to mind: I should write only about those things that will influence the reader in how they understand my understanding.  It has to have the potential of giving them some “Ah ha moments” of discovering for themselves new information on the information I share with them.  They should be able to say things like, “Ah ha, he could have missed seeing this being a Brahmin boy”; “it is unlikely that an official discussed these things with an ex-activist”, etc.  A good introduction will make my reader, a co-investigator in my project.

PS: I now have the rule, but the question remains: who am I?

Weighty matters

21 June 2007

I climbed the weighing machine today after two years. I pushed the scales to a familiar position and it remained upright.  I nudged it gently to no avail.  After considerable amount pushing around the scale tilted indicating I was somewhere there – and I had grown a full 20 KGs.  If have been Americanised in any way, it is this, and I seem to have put my deposits just where men in hurry always do – a pot belly.

31 July 2007

Strange things are happening to me.  I reached India 15 days ago and went to a women’s college in Chennai on some work.  I met the head of X department and she immediately called me “sir”.  I am unused to this, that too by a senior person in a hierarchical institution like a college in India.  I begged her to call me Vivek.  “Oh OK Professor Vivek”, she said very sincerely.  Earlier when I moved from place to place even a (low cost) rickshaw wala would not solicit me unless I asked for one.  This time around taxi drivers (the high cost end) rush to me to know where sar wants to go.  I have also had an easy time in getting things done in government offices.  Something seems to have changed.  My friends tell me that I am just the same but for some extra weight. I have been wondering what is happening to me.

I think I got a clue today.  A Panchayat president I interviewed told me sweetly that people listen to her because she’s plump.  Two years and twenty KGs earlier, I would have missed the import of the statement, but now I don’t.  I used to be so thin that I was called a skeleton, stick of a coconut leaf and other colourful adjectives.  Now these adjectives are gone, and I am convinced that my new status is due to my pot belly. I am ok with the status, but I am not sure if I should write about this in my dissertation.  Perhaps I should consult my ethnography professor.

Rose, black & brown

30 Sept 2007

Amma asked me not to spend too much time out in the sun during fieldwork.  She’s worried that I might become darker.  In the darkest person in the family already; after all, Tamil Brahmins tend to be fair complexioned.

I reached the village for fieldwork and had a conversation with a passerby.  He asked me to go and meet his friend who knows a lot on my topic, and telephoned his friend generously to say that I am coming.  Not knowing how to introduce me he thought for a while and then said, “a rose complexioned young man will come to meet you”.  I have now come a full circle.  I am rose complexioned where I do my fieldwork, black for my parents and brown for the American government.  Who indeed am I?

Ps. I think I told you this before, I should not have trusted my ethnography professor.

Disciplinary approach

Feb 2009

I went to a dissertation defence this afternoon.  My friend was candid and bold.  To many questions he answered candidly that he wanted to try a few things, but did not do so because it is not the norm in political science.  He said, “My hands are tied”.  I do not want to bind my hands, but academic culture may require me to write things in a particular way.  I am glad to be in the social science programme, unattached to any discipline so that I do not have to tie my hands.

Making the researcher visible

20 Oct 2009

A lot of people I met talked about communist, Dalit and other village level movements again and again. I also find reflections of these types of movements in many villages.  I guess these must have had a lot of impact. I am not too sure what other movements might have had an impact in the state…I guess I will never know all of them.

My fieldwork reflected five forms of collection action repeatedly giving me a reason to believe that these are among the major forms that had an impact on collective action in Tamil Nadu.

The following five forms of collective action had a significant impact in shaping institutional changes in Tamil Nadu.

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Unlike a lot of people, writing does not come to me naturally.  It has been a slow and difficult learning process, and I had to contend with massive writing project as I started the dissertation.  As it turned out, writing the dissertation was fun, but not always.  It took me an year and a half to write the dissertation after the fieldwork, and in the process, it helped me to know what other writers had gone through.  A lot of that advice came from the committee and from my peers at the University, and some of it came from webcasts on the art of writing.

These talks helped me reflect on writing: why I write, how to write, and what one goes through as a writer.  It helped me anticipate that I will have to re-write again and again, and that there will be days when I will get stuck staring at a blank page or a half-written paragraph.  It is not that these talks ensured that I did not get stuck, but it helped to know that it happens.  More  than anything else, they helped me remember that writing can be fun; something that a lot of us in the run to finish a long project forget.

Click on the list icon that looks like a stack of cards in the bottom to see the entire list of videos, or you can always visit my YouTube channel here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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One challenge that I faced while writing my dissertation was that every time I started a new chapter, I had to deal with multiple ways of organising it. For example, there were times when I could have narrated my story village by village. Alternatively, I could have organized the layout based on themes or chronology of events that would cut across each village. There was merit in organising the chapter in each of these methods. This is a challenge that a writer would face no matter what one writes: be it a story, a journal article, a movie script, a dissertation or any book for that matter.

If organising a chapter or a journal article is challenging, planning an entire book or a dissertation can be absolutely daunting. Sometimes, the author is forced to stick to some broad outlines that are enforced by the publisher or by the University that forces the decision on us. Most dissertations have an introduction wherein we are asked to describe the issue we’re working on, provide literature review, argue that this work is distinguished, discuss the research methods, et cetera. Such guidelines are certainly helpful in expediting our work, by making the decision of organising on our behalf. But even these broad outlines will never leave us without a choice of different ways of organising that which we are writing, at least in the two or three chapters that are left to us.

While the challenge of organising the layout cannot be wished away or mechanically solved, I found it useful to try out different possible layouts by putting each on a mind map. To continue with the previous example, I would start a mind map with three nodes: chronological, thematic and village-by-village. Under each of these nodes, I would attempt to narrate the story by putting the basic arguments together as a tree.

This process forces us to think about how exactly we would narrate the story, and in the process we would be able to identify the merits and pitfalls of each of these layouts. In the process of doing it, we also create a detailed outline that can be extremely helpful during the process of writing. Visualising arguments in different ways can also help us discover a new form of organising that is more logical and effective.

One unanticipated way in this process helped me was that the mind map presented me with a broken down set of topics that I had to write on, and I could focus on one little task at a time when I wrote, instead of trying to relate to the entire book or dissertation or a chapter at any given point of time. Thinking of the dissertation on the whole can be daunting, and the demotivation that comes with it makes us postpone the writing work. Tools like these can help us by putting us back on the track by breaking the daunting giant into manageable little parts.

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In April 2001 People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) approached the Supreme Court of India arguing that the government has a duty to provide greater relief in the context of mass hunger. The litigation has now become the best known precedent on the right to food internationally. This paper reviews the litigation with a view to understand various strategies used by the litigants to create and enforce far-reaching entitlements in a near legal vacuum on the right to food. This is followed by a discussion on the lessons from this case for rights based approach to development at large.

Citation:  S. Vivek and Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, “Rights Based Approach To Development: Lessons From The Right To Food Movement,” in Food Insecurity, Vulnerability and Human Rights Failure, Studies in Development Economics and Policy (Basingstoke: UK: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007).

Click here to download the article.

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During the 1980s, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), an NGO working in rural Rajasthan in India began to campaign for access to government records related to wage employment programs for the rural poor. In the course of their work, MKSS discovered that accessing official records and information was critical to exposing corrupt practices by officials at a local level. This soon became the central strategy in their fight against acts of corruption. MKSS rallied the support of other NGOs in Rajasthan, and started protests to make access to official records a legal right. The success of this movement in Rajasthan encouraged organizations in other parts of India to join hands with MKSS in lobbying for a powerful right to information law for the whole of India, which was passed in 2005.

MKSS and other NGOs involved in India’s right to information movement realized that merely having access to government records was not enough given the sheer complexity of the records and peoples’ ability to understand them. Over the last 20 years, they have developed a system for collecting, processing, and verifying government records and information on the ground. This process, known as a social audit, has now become one of the most popular tools to combat corruption in India.

Social auditing evolved in a rural setting in response to corruption that happens on a regular basis at the village level. This form of corruption is often referred to as corruption in the “last mile,” and it manifests in forms such as siphoning of pensions from the elderly, appropriating the wages of daily labourers, or diverting subsidized food grains from beneficiaries. The social audit approach allows India’s poor to play an active role in reducing corruption in their communities.

Social audits are typically organized by NGOs that work closely with the community, though some state governments in India have institutionalized this method with official patronage. The process of an audit involves gathering official records about a particular government project or development work (for example, cash books, muster rolls, measurement books, supply lists) and verifying if the activities and projects on paper, actually exist in reality. For example, let’s say that a ration shop that distributes subsidized food grains has recorded that Ram came to the shop every month and received 10 KG of wheat each month for the last six months. A social audit cross verifies this information through a door-to-door survey, where Ram is asked if he actually received his entitlement. If the audit finds that Ram did not receive his fair share, the community has proof that the ration shop siphoned rations and thus the act of act of corruption is exposed. The power of this process is evident by the fact that even though very few convictions happen on the basis of the findings of a social audit, data shows that the levels of corruption have reduced appreciably in places where audits have been organized regularly. After the data has been compiled, a large public gathering is organised where the data and findings from the audit are presented to the public. Typically, government officials, administrators, and citizens are invited to participate in these gatherings. .

The fundamental method of a social audit seems rather simple at first glance: access the official record and cross verify it with the person receiving the services or goods, such as the case with Ram. But, when you dig more deeply into the actual details of how the process takes place, there are many complexities and challenges. For example, one needs a lot of experience and expertise in order to understand which records to access, and whether they are complete and accurate. Once official records are obtained, it takes considerable skill and time to process the records before the door-to-door survey for verification of records can take place. These and other complexities make a social audit a costly affair requiring considerable human resources, skills, time, and organizational effort. As a result, social auditing has not been adopted on a wide scale throughout India, despite its promise. My hope is that with the right technology, the process can become more streamlined and efficient, and thus adopted more broadly.

I am working on an initiative at Stanford University’s Program on Liberation Technology to explore ways that technology, and particularly mobile phones, can be used to combat corruption at the grassroots level, and enhance the existing social audit approach. Through basic mobile phone SMS technology, official records on basic individual entitlements such as pensions, subsidized food grain, and maternity entitlements could be delivered to individuals via monthly text messages. Individuals, such as Ram in the scenario mentioned above, would be able to compare the count provided in the text message with the amount of rice he actually received. This would help him identify if he received what is legally due to him, or if a part of his entitlement was swindled without his knowledge.

We hope that this knowledge in itself would empower people who have been victims of corruption and would enable them to use this information to approach various grievance redressal mechanisms that they have access to. This might involve approaching senior officials, confronting the corrupt, or even taking up protests against the corrupt. At a later stage of the project, it may be possible to add other features that will enable the victims of corruption to take action using mobile phones. For example, the SMS could include the phone number of responsible officials, or an NGO could collect the complaints and initiate action on their behalf. While possibilities abound, we believe that the best initiative will come from the people themselves.

The main benefit of using SMS technology is that it requires very limited skill, knowledge, or effort from the user. And, it eliminates costly, time-consuming in-person surveys and audits. By using this technology, official information can be disseminated on a regular basis, unlike in the current model where social audits are done sporadically.

Like any technology tool, this of course has its limitations. One of the critical functions of social auditing in India has been its role in mobilizing the general public. The process of gathering people together face-to-face in a public meeting creates a collective energy, which can motivate people to fight corruption. By digitizing this system, these public gatherings will no longer be needed. That said, we believe that mobile technology brings the ability to more widely and regularly expose corruption that directly affects individuals, and as a result, has the power to ultimately lead to even greater collective anger that is often a precursor to mobilization. Further, it arms individuals with precise information – something they never had before — that officials cannot argue or ignore.

The project has now received the commitment of officials in the states of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh in India and a team that we helped organize is just starting to build the basic technology to store and disseminate public records. We will start with select programs such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India and expand the coverage over the next few years. Once the technology is ready, it will be implemented for two years in randomly selected villages, so that we can test if it has an impact on corruption compared to other villages where the system has not been introduced

In the last 15 years, the number of countries with right to information laws has increased dramatically. Along with this, there is increasing digitization of public records, which will make this kind of exercise relatively cheap. This means that we now have the legal and technical infrastructure to enable millions, rather than a small number of well organized groups, to combat corruption.

I would like to thank Alma Freema’s support in editing the article.

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Compared to most other states in India, Tamil Nadu is noted for widespread provision of education, primary health care, nutrition support, rural roads, electricity, water and other public services. These services are typically well planned and tend to work well. I examine what determines Tamil Nadu’s performance. I argue that widespread and decentralized collective action for public services plays a critical role in it but such collective action is a new phenomenon, dating back to the seventies. I also argue that normative challenges by major social movements, changing influences of various social groups and raising individual capabilities among common people played an instrumental role in enabling such collective action that ultimately had an impact on public services.

Click here to download the dissertation.

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Economic and Political Weekly recently carried the report of the survey by Devesh Kapur and others (Kapur et al. 2010). The paper argued that there have been important changes in grooming, eating practices and ceremonial consumption patterns of Dalits, and in general a rapid erosion of discriminatory practices that stigmatised the Dalits of Uttar Pradesh. This interesting survey draws attention to perceived discrimination, and how it has changed since the 1990s.

The authors draw attention to cognitive and social aspects of inequality such as self-respect, servility, and the extent to which people can participate fully in social and political life. In a caste-ridden context where drastic unfreedoms are imposed on people just on the basis of their birth, the use of toothpaste or bottled hair oil are not merely a matter of personal hygiene; it is a way of assertion, and a part of a parcel of measures to gain self-respect.

Similar issues came up during my fieldwork in Tamil Nadu. During one of my discussions, a Dalit activist recalled an incident that put him in the path of assertiveness. He said, a Dalit lawyer came to our village wearing a tie, neat clothes and shoes. Dalits do not dress like that, and we were all awed just at that sight. He had come to take up the case of discrimination against a Dalit, and when he walked into the police station all of us looked at it amazed. Even the police did not know how to deal with him, after all, Dalits did not get into police stations to negotiate with them. After discussing with them, he came out and went to a tea stall next to the police station which served Dalits in a separate teacup. After having the tea, he got up and smashed the teacup on the road and told the shopkeeper never to serve Dalits in separate teacup ever again. He was tip-top.

Being tiptop was associated with the ability to walk into police station or other government offices. It was associated with the ability to assert oneself in the society, and to participate in determining what the order of life should be. Without self-respect, it is impossible to gain the confidence that is required to deal with intimidating spaces that we have to constantly cross in contemporary life.

Wearing trousers or other ways of presenting oneself is not just a matter of individual choice. Many of my older Dalit discussants were ridiculed when they started wearing trousers first. Look at him, he’s trying to wear pants and shirts. Is he the son of the guy who used to work for our Padayachi? One of my discussants was ridiculed thus, by a caste Hindu. Nadars of southern Tamil Nadu had to wage an extensive campaign for the upper caste Hindus to allow the Nadar women to cover the upper parts of the body. Covering their body and wearing clothes in the style of higher caste women thus became a way of asserting themselves, and communicating insubordination.

The results of the survey in UP is something to be glad about. I believe that there can be no true democracy when one section of the population is condemned to a life without dignity and self-respect. Self-respect and dignity in the community are essential to participate in the society, to stand up for one’s aspirations and to contribute ideas for collective decisions. Without equal respect for all, there will never be equal participation in collective governance, and thus no democracy. Hair oil and toothpaste are expressions of Dalit self-assertion, and I hope that these mass attempts at gaining self-respect will lead to deepening democracy in Uttar Pradesh.

Kapur, Devesh, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Lant Prichett, and Shyam Babu. 2010. Rethinking Inequality: Dalits in Uttar Pradesh in the Market Reform Era. Economic & Political Weekly XLV, no. 35 (August 28): 39-49.

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The temptation and pressure to confirm in one’s research topic is tremendous – especially if you are a PhD student. In the course of the last 3 years many of my friends have asked me to include some quantitative element in my research. When I tell them that it does not suit my question they’d add, perhaps do what you do and then add some statistical work to it. When my (descriptive) interviews were almost done another friend goaded me to code it and regress it. The notion that regression is what makes a study authoritative is so deeply rooted among students today. To depart from it leaves a student in constant doubt.

Leaving quantitative methods is not the departure I did from the norm. Even within the tradition of qualitative research I am not situated in any particular method. I have taken the path that seemed most suitable to my questions and I feel that I have a story to say at the end of the day. But here is the catch. I am very conscious that my study has a lot of gaps (like most other studies do). The added knowledge that I have not stuck to any recognised method has made me feel insecure now and then. I had one such moment last year when I was just finishing my field work.

When I confided in a mathematician friend this is the advice he had for me. He said that it’s good that I have had the courage to choose the methods that I deemed most suitable for my questions. I have my facts and I have theorised the situation (my story) with much effort. Theory unlike a theorem (which is proved and will remain the same) is bound to change at some point of time. It is an attempt at the known amidst unknowns. A theory is bound to be tentative and vulnerable. So go on and tell your story the way it is without compromising your integrity or worrying about its acceptability. The advice has made me feel a lot better and it feels good to have friends who support you in academic adventures.

I have been lucky to have friends who have advised me in my moments of doubt and have nudged me to do what I find most sensible and exciting. In a world where conformity offers attractive dividends, I wonder if anyone could break from the ranks without the support of such friends. Strange as it may sound, and unacknowledged as it often is, friendships have an impact on our research that is as profound as the techniques we learn meticulously at school.

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When it comes to provision of basic amenities India performs badly by any account. Roads, electricity, water, schools, primary health, nutrition programmes, other amenities most basic to people today are poorly provided in most parts of India. Facilities that exist too are badly maintained and are often dysfunctional. While this is true by and large some states have performed exceptionally well. The famed example is Kerala whose education and health programmes have been remarkable. Another equally remarkable performer has been Tamil Nadu. The state has huge budgetary commitments for the social sector and most of these schemes also tend to work well. Most importantly there is a commitment to reach basic amenities to everyone rather than just serving the elite. In my research I have tried to uncover reasons behind TN’s remarkable commitment to provide a wide array of basic amenities universally to its people, and to examine why these work relatively well in a context where government programmes often perform poorly.

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Myron Weiner argued that India’s failure in providing universal education was due to the hierarchical mindset of the elite politicians and bureaucrats who did not consider it essential for children from the lower castes to be educated. Similarly in the Western world, there is evidence that evidence that relatively equal societies created provisions for universal primary education earlier. In other words, there is a strong relationship between social relations in a society and the role the government plays therein. I argue that in order to understand Tamil Nadu’s extensive commitments to its people we have to look at empowerment of traditionally oppressed people in four interrelated domains: political, social, production relations and individual freedoms. The dissertation will provide a detailed account of these changes and how they made agricultural labourers, ex-untouchable people, lower caste people, women and others socially and politically important. They were in turn able to use the political importance in forcing the state to provide basic amenities extensively. In the following paragraphs, I will provide a brief overview of changes in these domains.

The segregations of caste, gender and class in Indian society meant that people had limited opportunities in their lives. Their occupations, place of living, choice of partners and most other important things are limited by their status at birth. Not surprisingly educational opportunities will not be created for girls in a society which considers it wrong or unnecessary for girls to get educated. Schools, hospitals and most other facilities in India are typically created in the dominant hamlets making them difficult for untouchables and others to access. Tamil Nadu’s extensive provision of basic amenities cannot be understood without understanding the social change therein that opened opportunities widely. There is a long history of social movements in India that have shaped social (in)equality through ages. In 19th and 20th centuries a large number of such movements came together altering the social realities of Tamil Nadu. The best known among them is the Dravidian movement or the Self-respect movement which challenged caste and gender norms in the society. The Communist movement which started in the 1920s organised landless labourers and significantly shaped the rhetoric/agenda of other political movements in the state.

Even before these, many lower castes had organised themselves and had agitated for greater social, political and economic opportunities. These include the Nadars, Vanniars, Thevars, and Pariahs. These were often led by educated youth of these communities. There was also an impressive set of Untouchable leaders, almost all of whom got educational opportunities since their fathers’ were employed by the British. Tamil Nadu also had an impressive cultural movement led by individuals such as Bharathiar. The literary movement provided a powerful cultural challenge to various forms of domination including imperialism, caste, gender, production relations, etc.

These movements challenged existing social norms and argued for an alternate world free of domination, one where opportunities are available to all without any distinction. These artists argued against restrictions placed on communities to access public infrastructure including schools, water sources, roads, etc. They broke the myth that education is not for women. These social and cultural movements changed the context in which public policy is made, and set a tone where the ‘right thing to do’ is to provide education, health, etc. and other basic amenities to all. By redefining what is legitimate, they had an influence on how the government performed, especially when the rulers were politically challenged.

The social changes were closely related to political changes in the region. East India Company and the British government provided a political opportunity for the lower castes to gain political power. The British policy of ‘divide and rule’ and its idea that there should be no ‘governing classes’ in India to challenge their rule crated a political space for lower caste people. It grew further when representative (and later democratic) institutions were gradually introduced starting in mid-1800s. The democratic space that grew gradually made numbers significant and greatly empowered the backwards classes that are numerically superior in southern India. The Dravidian movement ensured that the numbers translated into political power by mobilising all these castes in what Christophe Jaffrelot calls a process of ‘ethnicisation’. A nascent women’s movement ensured that women got voting rights that gradually expanded from nothing in early 1900s to full adult franchise by 1947.

From 1920s onwards the Communist movement became powerful in the erstwhile Madras province creating a political space for the landless labourers and tenants. In the very first election after independence (in 1952) the Communist party got 64 seats and was a very powerful force in Tamil Nadu politics. Various caste organisations and especially the Vanniars Northern Tamil Nadu mobilised themselves politically and sought political offices. These organisations ensured that numerical superiority translated into political power. This is all the more significant since Tamil Nadu had fiercely competitive elections since India’s independence (in 1947). The electoral competition ensured that politicians do not easily ignore the demands of any organised group. The long process of political competition and mobilisation has also left the population highly politicised. Voter participation has been much higher in the state compared to rest of India (over 60% in the beginning itself). The voters are also highly informed of what various parties have to offer. Competitive politics amidst highly politicised and informed electorate with a choice of political parties to represent their cause makes it very difficult for political parties to survive without making considerable promises and delivering them.

Production relations too have changed with very large landlords disappearing fast – as a result loosening the hold of one class on another. These have had considerable impact in changing the rigid social structure of the Tamil society.

Today we see in Tamil Nadu considerably increased income levels, diversity of job opportunities, universal primary education, reduced caste rigidities and in general much increased individual freedoms. These resulted in a significant off-shoot, which is a high degree of decentralised collective action for basic amenities.

A common feature of all four changes is increasing clout of those originally left out to access, use and modify society’s institutions. The changes were led by determined collective action by various social movements initially and today’s good governance is sustained by a decentralised and widespread collective action among people today.

Based on these observations, I hope to argue that power is central to understanding institutions. It is uncontroversial to say that policies that benefit holders of power will tend to work well i.e. government and officials will have the right incentives to deliver to these sections. What is important though, is to conceptualise how power affects incentives. After an extensive review of literature that deals with institutions and development I develop a set of concepts that are relevant to understanding how social relations, freedoms and the structure of power affect institutions and incentives of the officials to perform.

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