Responsive to Whom? The State and Fast Track Participation in a South Indian District

Chhotray V¹*

1. Institute for Political and Economic Governance, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

With the recent emphasis on community based participatory development, the enduring question confronting practitioners is: how precisely must participatory projects be structured so as to combine collective decision-making with familiar methods of execution that prioritise target completion? This article examines an innovative attempt by a district government organisation in south India to incorporate participatory objectives of watershed development into a conventional four-year project framework.

The Kurnool district Watershed Office (KWO) in Andhra Pradesh interprets participation as consent; devises an efficient, itemised framework of participatory procedures; and systematically links these to other project targets. In theory, project targets cannot be met unless consent (either written or publicly articulated) is secured. KWO’s senior officers place uncritical emphasis on attaining a pro-project consensus (abandoning projects otherwise), and its local staff distance their projects from any unresolved conflict that may interfere with their pace.

The article shows how KWO’s indiscriminate pursuit of consensus becomes a strategy for appeasing the locally dominant in two project villages. Local staff members, in fear of losing their jobs, collaborate with local elite to reduce participation to a ritual of formal consent merely to fulfil targets. Unsurprisingly, the projects mainly benefit private landholders and the poorest groups continue to live on the fringes.

The article concludes that KWO adopts a textbook view of community as a harmonious collective without power relations and reinforces socio-economic marginalisation. Its misguided enthusiasm reflects bureaucratic impatience to ‘fit’ community participation into essentially top-down development, without resolving the structural inequalities that vitally shape participation.

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