Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: ...

had ultimately reached out and refused to accede to meanings accorded to them within mainstream development agendas.

Questions for Cooperative Dairying

This book aims to rework the conventional narratives of development by focusing on the perspectives provided by villages associated with India's cooperative dairying program, the centerpiece of national dairy development in India from the 1970s until the liberalization of the dairy sector in the 1990s. At the heart of the program is a puzzle related to its geographic unfolding. Given its ostensible success in the villages of the Anand and Kheda districts in the state of Gujarat, why did the program lose its luster in sites of replication across rural India? A perusal of the substantial literature that has accumulated around rural cooperative dairying will show that this question has usually led to heated exchanges over the meanings of success and failure, with the ultimate aim being to either prove or disprove the success of dairy development in Gujarat (e.g., Doornbos et al. 1990; National Dairy Development Board [NDDB] 1987). Such exchanges, however, have rarely ventured beyond the framework of development institutions associated with cooperative dairying, and thus have rarely considered that meanings of development are also constructed in the context of the village. The aim of this book, therefore, is to replace the question of the success and failure of dairy development with an understanding of discursive and material productions of livelihoods and identities in rural places.

The substitution of the question of successful development with the question of the place-based production of the village is impelled by three gaps in existing discussions of dairy development. First, even as the origins of cooperative dairying are consistently traced to a protest by farmers in the town of Anand in central Gujarat, the ways in which the politics of rural places has contributed to the subsequent unfolding of the program is not part of official discussions of success and failure. There is a need, therefore, to juxtapose institutional power with the politics of