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

earlier by Claude Alvares, a prominent alternative development activist from India, which classified the experience of dairy development as Another Revolution Fails (1985), inaugurating a slew of studies by primarily Dutch sociologists (e.g., Doornbos et al. 1990) on the problems with hasty declarations of the success of cooperative dairying. One solution proposed to such extreme perspectives on dairy development is to seek more rigorous analysis of the extent to which the program has succeeded or failed, through better designed village studies as well as more robust econometric analyses of national-level data (Munshi and Parikh 1994; George 1987a, 1986a). Yet, what does a final pronouncement on the success or failure of dairy development actually achieve? To view the program as an unmitigated success is to suggest that the inequalities that comprise rural society are not mirrored within cooperatives drawn from the rural, in effect arguing that the social bases of development are immaterial to its unfolding. Conversely, to view the program as being emblematic of failed development is to disregard a consistent rise in the number of village-level dairy cooperatives and is, thus, to ignore rural participants who have gained access to markets and membership within flows of development through dairy cooperatives. The need, therefore, is not so much to resolve the binary of dairy development, as it is to hold onto it in the interests of enabling a range of perspectives on the program. In order to move in this direction, it is useful to rehearse some of the key binary formulations that have been part of debates over the outcomes of dairy development.

Imperfect Replications

India's cooperative dairying program consists of two institutional elements. The first of these is Amul, the district cooperative formed in 1946 in the small town of Anand in the state of Gujarat to which villages in the Anand and Kheda districts are affiliated, and which constitutes the model of national dairy development that was sought to be replicated across rural India from the 1970s to the 1990s. The second is the program to replicate the Anand model across rural India under the auspices of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) established in Anand in 1965.