Introduction: powering knowledge from the margins

Tom Thomas and Pradeep Narayanan

Over the past two decades Praxis has witnessed the trials, tribulations and glories of 'participation', not as a bystander or uninvolved commentator but from inside the ring as a practitioner. Praxis' initiation came at a time of frenzied activity with the explosion of tools, field innovators, writers, and authors – a time when the development world was smitten by the participation bug. Everyone was adapting, modifying or innovating tools, renaming them as appropriate to specific theatres of participative action. The push was to adapt, innovate, document, and share. Praxis (in its previous avatar as a unit of ActionAid India) became the clearing house for much of these activities of the early 90s. Then came the scale-up and the big push by the World Bank through its 'Voices of the Poor' project that spanned continents. We joined that effort too by undertaking the India segment of the study. Participation became the buzzword and no project, be it of the World Bank, UK Department for International Development (DfID) or other donors/nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)/international NGOS (INGOs), was worthy without a 'participatory' tick in the checkbox. Participation was written into all donor- funded government programmes. Of course, scaling up comes with its share of problems and criticisms. The decade that followed saw a slew of these, and participation was then declared the new orthodoxy and the new development tyranny.

We agree and identify with most of the criticism, and looking back, we wonder whether it is the price we paid for the move from the margins to the mainstream – or whether there is something inherent in the approach that couldn't stand up to the expectations? The answer probably lies somewhere at the intersection of these two. There is no denying that the approach was a huge paradigm shift for aided developmental interventions. Knowledge creation has been problematic since time immemorial – at best it attempted neutrality and at worst, it was a blatant display of power by the dominant class or caste. What got buried deep beneath all this is the struggle of people living in poverty: people who are stigmatized and excluded. Within development circles, participation for the first time opened its doors to a more systematic and equitable inclusion of the pariahs in knowledge creation through the pioneering work of Robert Chambers and others. People living in poverty were for the first time being asked their views and their priorities. Through Whose Reality Counts? and similar work, their reality was being given a premium. They were being heard rather than being told, for a change. The sites for exercise of power were loosening up. However, the liberating potential of this experience remained limited because much of these interactions were one-offs, confined to the Western philosophical tradition of knowledge for its own sake rather than being founded in the history of struggles of the marginalized. This defect slowly began to be challenged by many practitioners from the global South, and the addition of 'Action' to the terminology reflected this shift (Participatory Reflection and Action/Participatory Learning and Action). Somewhere along this stage in the history of participatory approaches came the intersection with the scaling up by the big players. The scaling up was resourced by proponents of neoliberal ideology that encouraged and supported the utilitarian aspects of participatory approaches, focusing on stakeholder engagement for faster implementation and better efficiency. It saw in the approach a quick way to gain access to a new community, get (and often set) their expectations, forge consensus and allocate roles – thereby reducing costs, managing crowds better, and increasing project efficiency. The governments that adopt this approach often view community engagement as one-dimensional and yearn for depoliticized forms of participation that are sanitized, clinical and conflict-free (Whitfield, 2012). A good part of participatory approaches got pushed back into the fold of knowledge for its own sake, with no particular accent on dialogue to raise critical consciousness or probe deeper into structural causes of poverty. This made it easy for the new financiers (and hence self-assumed managers) of the approach to cherry-pick whatever suited their scheme of things – the prime example being the World Bank's 'Voices of the Poor' initiative. Fairly soon along this trajectory, a mockery of the approach also came in the form of compartmentalization of community participation as a separate component. It was often sanctioned long after the planning and programme roll out phases were under way – making do without even the need for cherry-picking! The likes of the World Bank, The Asian Development Bank and DfID excelled in this.

Even when the political left dabbled with participation at scale (such as in the People's Plan Campaign, Kerala), it failed to go beyond the party's attempt at community outreach. Even here it continued to focus on surface-level issues and skimmed over structural causes of inequality and marginalization. It also almost completely failed to reach out to the poorest – the adivasis (tribal communities) of Kerala.

Why participation? It owes much of its intellectual heritage to the Western philosophical construct of knowledge for its own sake that assumed political neutrality of knowledge. It was resourced and scaled up by neoliberals who, at best, used it as a mechanism for project management. Even the left used it mainly as an outreach programme. Though this remained the mainstreamed paradigm, many continued to explore the subversive potential that participation offered. Some saw its potential for conscientization, infusing some of Paulo Freire's thinking into it, while others used it to explore the local power dimension more deeply. David Archer's REFLECT (Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques) and John Gaventa's Power Cube are some examples of these explorations. We in Praxis, in the two decades of our work, continued our search for ways of re-politicizing participation to give it the edge, to subvert for good, in the continued struggle for a democratic basis for state power, without which addressing structural causes of poverty would be a near impossibility.

What you will find in this book is an assortment of explorations of the subversive potential of participation, particularly by powering knowledge from the margins. It explores ways of tackling some of the challenges posed to powering knowledge from the margins through challenging dominant data; tackling myths; and showcasing alternatives. The chapters 'Breaking the barriers to information'; 'Lost policies', and 'Building consensus methodically' address the tyranny of existing data by creating alternate data that clearly show the gaps and blind spots in the so-called 'official' data. The chapters 'A new deluge?' and 'Subverting for good', bust the myths that dominate development practice. 'A new deluge?' challenges the myth perpetuated by development practitioners and governments that communities do not have the inclination or capacity to participate in planning for their relief and rehabilitation, and that all interventions in the aftermath of disasters need to be top-down. This pioneering work showed that disaster-affected communities are fully capable, and that preventing them from participating could misguide the entire intervention. It demonstrated that participation in post-disaster situations was not a luxury but non-negotiable and eminently achievable. Similarly, the work with sexual minorities challenged the myth that stigma is only a by-product of their HIV status rather than a cause of it. Communities from across six states in India in unison argued that stigma is one of the biggest challenges that affect their mobility, choices and health-seeking behaviour and are a cause of their discrimination, rather than a manifestation of it. The chapters 'Knowledge base', 'Making people count' and 'Re-imagining development' showcase alternative paradigms and possibilities that demonstrate how people living in poverty have the ability to engage in spaces that were hitherto reserved for academics, civil society organizations and consultants. The community-led evaluation of a UNDP programme in 'Making people count' demonstrated that communities can take on the role of evaluators and produce a very grounded and informed take on the state of affairs, often offering insights that external evaluators will not be capable of. It offered practical ways of dealing with questions of subjectivity and offered alternative pathways to evaluations. The Ground-Level Panel showed that people living in poverty have the ability to engage with matters beyond their immediate needs, by critiquing the UN High Level Panel recommendations and suggesting their vision for a post-2015 framework. Both of these experiences put forth alternative paradigms that show that communities are capable of direct talk and no longer need interpreters to talk on their behalf.

The chapters also offer much richer subtexts on processes, dilemmas, and power-plays within the development sector itself, as well as nuanced accounts of people's existence and development practices. For example, 'Lost policies' reveals disparities in the location of and access to public services depending on who you are, which god you pray to and which caste you belong to. 'A new deluge' shows the entire development sector and the Indian Government's complete misreading of the local political economy and design of thoroughly faulty recovery programmes. 'Breaking the barriers to information' deals with the struggles over one of the most contested resources – land. The struggles of sexual minorities against the use of stigma as a tool to push them into sub-human existence are a dominant thread in the chapter 'Subverting for good'. The chapter 'Knowledge base' also outlines the subtle power struggles between civil society organizations and community-based organizations, and the liberating potential of access to data.

This book zeroes in on experiences that bring subaltern voices into the reckoning while discounting those that showcase 'participation' as a panacea. It addresses both practitioners as well as those more inclined to theorizing. Both might find experiences that resonate with their own experiences or theories of change. The thread that connects all of the chapters is the attempted subversion of existing power relations in favour of communities.

Breaking the barriers to information: community-led land mapping in Bihar

Anindo Banerjee, Rohan Preece, and Anusha Chandrasekharan

Abstract

1 Inequities in rights over land in Bihar, simmering disputes, and years of frustrated attempts to secure justice form the backdrop to a grassroots land-mapping exercise undertaken in 38 villages in 2008. This chapter charts steps made by landless and land-scarce people to map land within their own villages and achieve local ratification for them. It cites examples of how these maps were used to claim access to land. The process is understood as a journey of conscientization leading in many cases to praxis and even, in a few cases, to land justice. Land mapping of this kind involves various subversions of knowledge and practice: some of these are discussed, as well as some enduring challenges.

Keywords: social justice, land rights, casteism, Bihar land records, commuity-owned data

Setting the scene

In contexts of land scarcity, disagreements over who owns what sometimes escalate into disputes, especially when land is perceived as being encroached on or unfairly obtained. Bihar, a state in northern India bordering Nepal, is a case in point. Home to more than 100 million people, it has been affected by disputes over land in recent decades. In the 1990s, regular battles were waged between upper-caste militias, who often enjoyed political patronage, and left-leaning anti-establishment groups claiming to represent the interests of disadvantaged people. Violence scarred the landscape as tensions boiled over into bloody attacks and reprisals. The situation has now simmered down, but the inequity – a disturbing union of land ownership and caste privilege – remains.

For some time now, ever since British rule and the exaltation of the zamindars(landowners) who kept millions of labourers in a state of peasantry, Bihar has been marked by severe disparities in land ownership. Land is also in relatively short supply: almost 30% of the land in this densely populated state is uncultivable. Unsurprisingly, Bihar has a much higher share of marginal farms (agricultural land up to 1 hectare/2.5 acres) than other states in India. The 2010–11 Agricultural Survey, which categorizes land into marginal, small, semi-medium, medium, and large, found that 91.06% of operational holdings in Bihar were marginal – more than 24 percentage points higher than the share in the country as a whole. Disparities in holdings are particularly significant between scheduled castes and more privileged social groups.

In Bihar, extreme poverty lies at the thick end of daunting inequality. The state has the lowest levels of household expenditure in India and chronic levels of malnutrition (Dreze and Sen, 2013, Statistical Appendix). Yet, despite social problems and inadequate steps for reform, progressive legislation and policies have been passed in attempts to heave the state out of semi-feudalism and into a more contemporary – if still exploitative – landowner-centric, yield-oriented system of production. The abolition of the Zamindari Act was implemented as a law in 1948, and the Land Reform Act was passed as long ago as 1950. The Bhoodan social movement that took hold in Bihar, as elsewhere in India, in the early 1950s, held the promise of landless and landpoor people accessing land offered to them by the land-rich, but without the security of ownership. It was given legislative backing in 1954, though it achieved limited success in realizing its transformational potential.

The average size of a landholding in Bihar is considerably smaller than in India as a whole: 0.39 hectares in Bihar as opposed to the national figure of 1.16 hectares. Scheduled tribes in Bihar have, at 0.5 hectares, less than a third of the size of scheduled tribe landholdings at the national level of 1.53 hectares (Agriculture Census, 2010-11). People from scheduled castes fare particularly badly in Bihar, with average landholdings of just 0.3 hectares: less than half the size of the national average landholding for scheduled castes of 0.8 hectares.

In 1961 – after some resistance – an act was passed to prevent excessive private ownership. This, the Bihar Land Reforms (Ceiling, Land Allocation and Surplus Land Acquisition) Act, allowed any individual to own up to 30 acres of land. By 1973, it had been changed to entitle ownership to a family rather than to an individual, stipulating a limit of 45 acres for each family.

However, administrative inefficiencies and delays played into the hands of the landed, as in the years that followed, the slow rate of implementation of these acts allowed time for the land to be divided amongst family members or other individuals loyal to them. Many also took advantage of legal loopholes enabling landowners to retain excess land provided that it was used for specific purposes, such as homestead land or land for commerce.

Today, the inequity continues, with over a third of rural households in Bihar entirely landless. At the same time, numerous individual landowners sit on vast tracts of land. In certain districts as many as 70% of households are landless. This usually means they have to work on leased land, handing over more than half of their gross output to the landowners, almost double what is normally paid elsewhere.

With most land records dating from before independence, and with land inequities between the landed and the landless aligning closely with multiple economic, social and political inequities, those who most need to make their voices heard typically struggle to do so. They struggle amid an informal system, as most arrangements of share-cropping are based on oral agreements in which legal protection of tenants is often elusive.