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

was more development and not an examination of the class biases inherent in the adoption of new agricultural technologies (Appadurai 1990; Byres 1981).

Like rural antipoverty programs, small farmers continue to be a major presence in India, and their numbers have only partially declined from the 1970s to the 2000s (Planning Commission 2009a). Given this, they cannot be ignored within national planning in a democratic context, yet both in the erstwhile period of state-led development and in the contemporary context of market-led development, the exigencies of small landholdings have been sought to be overcome through a focus on technology. The extent to which new technologies fit uncomfortably with small-scale agricultural operations is thereby not considered (Appadurai 1990). Moreover, the larger issue in terms of the persistence of small farms is the absence of nonfarm economic opportunities (D. Das 2007), and while dairying is often mentioned as a way in which farm incomes can be diversified, there has been no analysis of the ways in which dairying incomes actually further entrench small farmers by ensuring the viability of small landholdings.

Official pronouncements by the dairy development program of the extent to which cooperatives are composed of small farmers seem to turn necessity into a virtue. While it has been argued that animals are more equitably distributed than land in rural India (A. Patel 2003), it is not clear if dairy development can be credited with contributing to, or merely continuing, this pattern of resource distribution. The discursive significance of small farmers, in fact, could be that the cadence of “small” hides the exclusionary meanings of “farmers.” Critical analyses of the program's antipoverty goals have thus led to official assertions that its main goal is to connect rural producers to urban markets, and not specifically to alter the social structure of rural India (NDDB 1987). A more manageable marketing goal is thus substituted for the far more nebulous concept of poverty alleviation.

However, while it is clear that small farmers are an important category in India's development planning, do small farmers also constitute a political identity? In this context, new farmers' movements in India become