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

rural places in order to gain insights into the obstacles that impede uniform implementations of the cooperative model of dairying.

There is also a need within studies of dairy development to link the success of the program to the distribution of agrarian resources that enable participation in dairying, especially since farming systems in India usually combine agriculture and dairying, and continue to retain elements of both subsistence and commercially oriented production. Thus, the ways in which the mixed nature of rural livelihoods impinges on local values attributed to cooperative dairying become an aspect of the unfolding of the program that is likely to be key in terms of its outcomes.

An especially puzzling gap in official pronouncements of dairy development is in regard to gender. That is, even as the program constantly invokes women's participation, this invocation serves merely to represent how women are empowered by participation in dairy development, and rarely acknowledges the crucial role played by gender divisions of work in the construction of successful dairy development (Candler and Kumar 1998; United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific [UN ESCAP] 1981). The fact that gender has not been viewed as a factor in the production of successful dairy development is all the more intriguing given that dairying in Anand, the place of origin of India's cooperative dairying program, is primarily the work of women. There is a need, therefore, to modify the existing utilization of women as simply markers of successful development outcomes in favor of representing development as the end result of both women's and men's work.

In order to address these gaps in existing studies, this book directs three principal questions toward village-level cooperative dairying. First, in what ways do village-level political struggles find expression in the village dairy cooperative? This question juxtaposes the coordination of the program through international, national, and regional development agencies with the social and political histories of rural places that impinge on the local scale of implementation. By locating the politics of the dairy development program within the historical production of