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

obstructed both in material terms, through state support for policies of privatization in the service of multinational capital (J. Moore 2008), as well as in discursive fashion, through announcements of the impending, inevitable urbanization of the world (Satterthwaite 2009). To sketch out the meanings of inhabiting the rural in the global context is, thus, an argument against both material and discursive erasures of agricultural livelihoods in existing understandings of the global economy (Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2008; Fraser 2008). In fact, rural development programs, by demonstrating the centrality of rural places to global and national strategies of accumulation, show how the rural, rather than being subject to erasure, has been the target of overpowering surveillance, with antipoverty programs of international development agencies being one of the principal guises adopted by such practices of surveillance.

Second, the adoption of neoliberal policies as the standard approach toward development—characterized by the opening of national economies to foreign investment, the withdrawal of social subsidies, and the privatization of public and community resources—has begun to show its effects in the exacerbation of urban-rural economic inequalities (Taylor 2009; Navarro 2007). While rural India has also asserted itself through electoral and nonelectoral strategies (P. Patnaik 2007; Oza 2004), programs like cooperative dairying point to a development era when the state was, to some extent, seeking to intervene in favor of rural constituencies (Bardhan 2003; Madan 1990; K. Singh 1986). To reflect on the value of state-supported and community-led dairy development is, thus, to question the privatization of the dairy sector, and to trace the losses that are likely to be inflicted by neoliberalization on small-scale rural livelihoods (U. Patnaik 2007; Shiva 2007; Vakulabharanam 2005; Hart 1998).

Another reason to focus on rural places is their association with subsistence livelihoods (Waters 2007), and India's cooperative dairying program becomes an especially useful context for linking the practice of small-scale agriculture to the sustenance of rural communities (D. Das 2007). Given that 60 percent of agricultural landholdings in India can be described as “marginal” (less than 1 hectare [approximately