Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the moral and temporal frames through which a range of development and social protection programmes are interpreted in rural India. By exploring discourses of care and dependency in a village community, I aim to shed new light on the terms used to understand poverty alleviation.

Paper long abstract:

In rural north India, people are well-acquainted with the potential benefits to be gained from a range of poverty alleviation programmes available through the state’s distribution system, short-term schemes, and public-private partnerships (PPPs). At the level of village governance, programmes such as economic assistance, food rations, and construction subsidies are often mediated by similar bureaucratic procedures that emphasize their shared qualities. However, such programmes also have distinctive histories, objectives, time frames, funding structures, and moral imperatives that determine how they circulate within communities. As histories of poverty alleviation efforts in India have shown, the constellation of developmental and distributive models that coexist today often reflect different policy eras, values, and priorities, yielding a complex repertoire of conceptual terms to describe and understand them (e.g. development, social security, or welfare). In this paper, I seek to offer ethnographic specificity to these terminological complexities by exploring how notions of care, dependency, and self-sufficiency are invoked among rural residents in Rajasthan, India. I show how the temporalities and moral assumptions of different state programmes converge in the daily lives and imaginaries of rural residents, generating new interpretations of responsibility and social support. I argue that this ethnographic vantage point can begin to reconcile normative distinctions between approaches to poverty alleviation and foregrounds the importance of lived experience for the study of social protection.