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10 - A Women-Inclusive Emancipatory Alternative to Corporate Capitalism? The Case of Kerala’s State-Instituted Kudumbashree Programme
- Edited by Rohit Varman, University of Birmingham, Devi Vijay, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta
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- Book:
- Organizing Resistance and Imagining Alternatives in India
- Published online:
- 30 June 2022
- Print publication:
- 10 November 2022, pp 318-354
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Summary
With the ongoing advancement of capitalism, corporate capitalism – a specific variety of capitalism that is grounded in neoliberal ideology (Harvey, 2007) – has been engulfing economic and social relations worldwide (Giridharadas, 2018). Simultaneously, the search for alternatives to corporate capitalism has been ascending in both academic (Bollier, 2014; Cruz et al., 2017; Kothari and Joy, 2017; Parker et al., 2014; Wright, 2010) and non-academic circles (Cumbers, 2017; A. Ferguson, 2009). A major focus of this search has been in ‘developing’ countries like India that face the onslaught of corporate capitalism (Kothari and Joy, 2017; Shrivastava and Kothari, 2012) while being ranked 103 out of 119 countries in the Global Hunger Index. The neoliberal economic reforms introduced in India since the early 1990s have had a significant influence on developmental policies of even the states such as Kerala and West Bengal that have been governed by left-of-centre parties (for example, Communist Party of India–Marxist) (Das, 2019; Krishnamoorthy, 2010).
A central theme of inquiry on alternatives to corporate capitalism is of women-inclusive emancipation (Werlhof, 2007) and thereby the need to explore the emancipatory struggles of marginalized women who are involved in the creation of alternatives (A. Ferguson, 2009). In this chapter, we undertake such exploration through ethnographic field immersion in a programme called ‘Kudumbashree’ instituted by the Kerala state in 1998 with the objective of women empowerment and inclusion (NIPCCD, 2008).
The extant literature on Kudumbashree can be categorized into two broad streams. One stream evaluates the programme from the perspective of its ability to produce economic empowerment among women belonging to below poverty line (BPL) families, who are the primary targets for the Kudumbashree programme. This research uses traditional indicators of economic empowerment such as economic and financial asset accumulation and land productivity (for example, Agarwal, 2018; Chathukulam and Thottunkel, 2010) and finds that the Kudumbashree programme outperforms similar poverty eradication programmes elsewhere in terms of creating economic empowerment. The second stream of literature acknowledges the programme as being different from traditional anti-poverty programmes because of Kudumbashree's explicit focus on the participation of target groups in decisions that involve their livelihoods (for example, Williams et al., 2012).
Chapter 7 - Acting for Change: A Circuits of Power Analysis of a Denotified Nomadic Tribe and Budhan Theater's Struggle for Change
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- By Prateek Shah, doctoral fellow in the Innovation and Management in Education Area at the Indian Institute of Management, George Kandathil, Assistant Professor in Organisational Behaviour area at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Anvika Kapoor, post-graduate student at the National Institute of Design, Gandhinagar
- Edited by Devi Vijay, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, Rohit Varman, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta
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- Book:
- Alternative Organisations in India
- Published online:
- 05 April 2018
- Print publication:
- 30 October 2017, pp 183-204
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Summary
We arrive in an auto-rickshaw; on its three wheels it is far more capable of plying the single narrow road in Chharanagar than a car. It is our first visit and we end up missing the library altogether, instead getting off at a railway crossing at the end of the road, from where we are escorted backwards on foot. We are later told that years ago, renowned writer-activist Mahasweta Devi and noted literary critic and activist G. N. Devy had stood at the same railway crossing when they came to meet the Chharas – a criminalised tribal community that lives in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. That particular meeting had heralded the possibility of a different future for the community.
We sit in the library, and over the next two days hear from the Chharas about their history, their circumstances and their recent efforts to change those circumstances. We are taken around Chharanagar as well: while there is only a single road, there are many narrow lanes, accessible only to feet and bicycles, where an entire community lives. Discouraging as the sights of the community's living conditions are, however, it is not in their poverty that the tragedy of their plight lies – such poverty is quite common in this country. What really ails the Chhara community is their powerlessness, their inability to change their plight because the label of ‘born criminals’ given to them by the British a century ago has stuck on even generations after independence, carrying with it all the social stigma and oppression that it carried then and perhaps more. The stigma denies most opportunities even to those few Chharas who possess some economic capital; for the large majority born without wealth, it is the ocean that separates them from the aspiring youth of modern India.
Our aim in this chapter is to describe the story of the Chharas as they have told it to us, as well as analyse their situation, and their attempts to change it, through theories of power. Specifically, we employ Clegg's (1989) framework of the circuits of power that comprises three different circuits – the episodic, the dispositional and the facilitative – that operate in an interconnected manner to create distributions of power.