Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: Making Place for Rural Development
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Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: ...

Chapter 1:  Introduction: Seeking Success, Finding Farmers
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significantly, between the Anand model and the specific experiences of Anand. According to George (419–420),

The real Anand pattern concerns a dairy co-operative: it is located in a specific geographic, historical and social context; it is based on an agro-economic system which arose from those circumstances; it is subject to all the economic forces of production and marketing engendered by the nature of the commodity; like other human institutions, it is structured on the ubiquitous lines of institutional inequality; thus it has plus and minus points relative to other patterns of milk production and distribution.
The notional Anand pattern is unrealistically located in time and space, appropriate to all geographical and historical contexts, whether in India or abroad; it soars above the mundane agro-economic realities of Kaira [Kheda] and India; it transcends the limitations of dairy production and marketing; it reverses the elitist affinities of liquid milk which favor large-scale producers and affluent consumers; in short, it is not linked to reality.

George thus directed attention to disjunctures between the discourses and materialities of cooperative dairying. Yet, the difference between Anand and its replications need not be classified only as failure, but could point to the insertion of place-specific exigencies and, hence, to the adaptability of the model to the context of its implementation. As George (1985a, 180) herself articulated it, “The ‘real’ KDMPCU [Amul] formula, if there be any such beast, is simply this: to each locality, product, group, the freedom to evolve its own pattern.” Her argument against the obsession with a model of development, however, assumes that the existence of the model is challenged by the lack of an actually existing cooperative structure that conforms to it. Yet, to what extent do the imaginations of development actually require to be materially realized in order to continue to exert power through development institutions?

Discourses and Counterdiscourses of Development

As debates over dairy development have been marked by intransigent perspectives over success and failure, there seems to be some value to