TY - JOUR
T1 - “A Big Machine Not Working Properly” Elite Narratives of India’s Community Projects, 1952–58
AU - Kumar, Prakash
N1 - Funding Information:
Community development projects were the Indian postcolonial state’s first major developmentalist initiative. They were launched on a pilot basis in 1948, just a year after independence, and on a nationwide scale on 2 October 1952. The postcolonial elites of the early republic trusted community projects to deliver on multiple developmental goals. This trust was reflected in a growing administrative infrastructure and a network of community development blocks and extension centers that expanded at a brisk pace in India in the 1950s. India sought and received early support from the Ford Foundation, and later received support in technical and social scientific expertise for these projects from the U.S. State Department under President Harry Truman’s Point Four program of technical aid.3
Funding Information:
In the early days of the community project, the Ford Foundation sponsored S. K. Dey’s trip to various locations within the United States, Mexico,
Funding Information:
The first community project in India was launched in a zone comprising a group of sixty-four villages in the Etawah district of Uttar Pradesh in 1948. This “pilot plan,” as this early project was called, was the result of efforts initiated by Albert Mayer, an American city planner, who obtained the support of important collaborators in India. Mayer was acting in his capacity as a private citizen. He had come into contact with Nehru and apparently charmed him with plans of development through community action. He received Nehru’s support and encouragement. Subsequently, the state government of Uttar Pradesh sponsored the launch of the Etawah project under Mayer’s leadership.26 As a separate effort, the Ford Foundation’s collaboration with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research led to the launch of fifteen additional pilot community projects in 1951–52, one in each of the fifteen states in India.27 Subsequently, the Ford Foundation also funded the establishment of training schools for village level workers (or VLWs) and project officials of community projects. The U.S. State Department joined this collaborative program and provided a much larger quantum of resources. It supplied funds, materials, and personnel to the Indian government to launch the first major tranche of fifty-five community development “areas” across the country in 1952 (figs. 1–2).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
PY - 2019/10
Y1 - 2019/10
N2 - This article argues against the common assumption in the field of development studies about “depoliticization” of the terrain in which development is conceived, implemented, and received. Taking the case of the history of “community development project” in India between 1952 and 1958, it makes the case that technocratic development in post-independence India involved a case of active, all around politics of negotiation. India’s postcolonial elites were quite self-consciously geared to “own” the program in the name of nation and nation-building. The subjects of development were not passive either. It is certainly possible to read their politics of resistance in the process of development’s implementation and in elite narratives of development.
AB - This article argues against the common assumption in the field of development studies about “depoliticization” of the terrain in which development is conceived, implemented, and received. Taking the case of the history of “community development project” in India between 1952 and 1958, it makes the case that technocratic development in post-independence India involved a case of active, all around politics of negotiation. India’s postcolonial elites were quite self-consciously geared to “own” the program in the name of nation and nation-building. The subjects of development were not passive either. It is certainly possible to read their politics of resistance in the process of development’s implementation and in elite narratives of development.
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U2 - 10.1353/tech.2019.0100
DO - 10.1353/tech.2019.0100
M3 - Article
C2 - 31761792
AN - SCOPUS:85075497923
SN - 0040-165X
VL - 60
SP - 1027
EP - 1058
JO - Technology and Culture
JF - Technology and Culture
IS - 4
ER -