Anthropology in Practice II: Community Development Projects, Revisits and Restudies, Intervention, the Research Process and Social Impact Assessment, Anthropological Approaches in Community Studies, Plans and Sub-Plans, NGOs, the Empowerment of Women, and LGBT Groups

Community development is a method by which the people of a community, with the help of the state, plan and carry out improvements in their own living conditions. Before independence it was tried in several experiments: Rabindranath Tagore's rural reconstruction at Sriniketan (from 1921), the YMCA's Marthandam project in Travancore under Spencer Hatch, F.L. Brayne's "uplift" drive in Gurgaon in the 1920s, and the Firka development scheme in Madras (1946). The immediate model was the Etawah pilot project in Uttar Pradesh, begun in 1948 under the American planner Albert Mayer, which combined agricultural extension with village-level workers who lived among the villagers. The national Community Development Programme was launched on 2 October 1952 with fifty-five projects, each covering about three hundred villages, and the National Extension Service followed in 1953; the country was divided into development blocks under a Block Development Officer, with a multipurpose village-level worker (gram sevak) as the link to the village, and programmes in agriculture, animal husbandry, irrigation, health, education, communication, cooperation and social welfare. The results were mixed, and anthropologists were among the first to say so. S.C. Dube's India's Changing Villages (1958), based on a project area in western Uttar Pradesh, found that benefits went mainly to the landowning and upper castes, that officials and villagers misunderstood each other across a gap of culture and status, and that programmes were judged by targets rather than by people's felt needs. The Balwant Rai Mehta Committee (1957), appointed to review the programme, concluded that it had failed to create popular participation, and recommended democratic decentralisation — the origin of Panchayati Raj. Urban community development began with pilot projects in Delhi (from 1958) and in cities such as Ahmedabad, Baroda and Hyderabad in the 1960s, organising slum residents into neighbourhood committees for self-help in sanitation, education and income generation; later programmes for the urban poor included Urban Basic Services (1986), the Swarna Jayanti Shahari Rozgar Yojana (1997) and the National Urban Livelihoods Mission (2013, now Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana–NULM). Tribal community development began with the Special Multipurpose Tribal Development Blocks of 1954; the Elwin Committee (1959) and the Dhebar Commission (1960–61) found them too uniform and too rushed, and they were replaced by Tribal Development Blocks and, from the Fifth Plan, by the Integrated Tribal Development Projects of the Tribal Sub-Plan (Chapter 24). The anthropological lessons have been constant: programmes must begin from local knowledge and institutions, reach the poorest and not only the influential, respect the pace and priorities of the community, and be evaluated from the community's point of view.

A revisit is the return of an ethnographer to a community studied before, by the same scholar or another; a restudy is a new study of the same community; a reinterpretation is a new reading of the same or new data. The classic case is Tepoztlán in Mexico: Robert Redfield (1930) described a harmonious, integrated folk community; Oscar Lewis (Life in a Mexican Village, 1951) found conflict, envy, poverty and suspicion. The difference, they agreed, came partly from change, partly from their different questions and methods, and partly from their own values. Mead and Freeman on Samoa (Chapter 21) is a reinterpretation that became a controversy. Raymond Firth returned to Tikopia after a cyclone and famine (Social Change in Tikopia, 1959), a revisit that measured change against his earlier baseline (We the Tikopia, 1936). In India, Karimpur, studied by the Wisers from the 1920s, was restudied by Susan Wadley (Struggling with Destiny in Karimpur, 1925–1984, 1994); Epstein returned to Wangala and Dalena; Srinivas's Rampura and Béteille's Sripuram have been revisited. Michael Burawoy (2003) classified revisits by whether the differences are traced to the observer or to the world, and to internal processes or external forces. Intervention is deliberate action to change a situation — a programme, a project, a policy or an advocacy campaign — and anthropologists take part in designing, delivering and evaluating it. Kurt Lewin's action research (1946) set out a cycle of planning, action, observation and reflection, and participatory action research, developed in Latin America by Orlando Fals Borda, makes community members co-researchers who own the process and its results. Every intervention raises ethical questions of consent, power and unintended consequences, and the "do no harm" principle applies. The research process runs through the formulation of a problem; a review of the literature; hypotheses or research questions; the research design (exploratory, descriptive, explanatory or evaluative); the choice of site and sample; fieldwork and data collection by participant observation, interviews, genealogies, case studies, surveys and participatory methods (Chapter 2); analysis and interpretation; writing; and the return of results to the community, with ethical review and informed consent throughout. Social impact assessment (SIA) is the process of identifying, predicting, evaluating and managing the social consequences of planned interventions — dams, mines, highways, industrial corridors, protected areas and urban projects. The International Association for Impact Assessment's International Principles for SIA (2003) set out its aims: to bring about a more sustainable and equitable environment, to consider all affected people and to involve them. Its stages are scoping, baseline profiling, prediction of impacts on livelihoods, culture, health, gender, community cohesion and vulnerable groups, formulation of mitigation and benefit-sharing measures, and monitoring. In India the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 requires an SIA, with a public hearing and review by an independent expert group, before land is acquired for a public purpose, and requires the prior consent of at least 80 per cent of affected families for private projects and 70 per cent for public–private partnership projects, with special safeguards for Scheduled Areas and gram sabhas; environmental clearance under the EIA Notification (2006) adds a public hearing. Anthropologists contribute baseline ethnography, knowledge of land tenure and customary rights, and attention to those whom official surveys miss — landless labourers, women, nomadic users of the commons.

The syllabus lists fifteen fields in which anthropologists study communities for the sake of improving their lives. What unites the approaches is holism, the insider's view, attention to inequality within the community, and fieldwork over time. Public health: anthropologists study local ideas of illness and healing, the use of plural medical systems, and the barriers — distance, cost, language, distrust, gender — that keep people from services; community health workers such as the ASHAs of the National Rural Health Mission (2005) were designed to bridge that gap, and ethnography has shaped programmes on malaria, tuberculosis, maternal health and, in tribal areas, sickle-cell disease. Education: studies of tribal and Dalit schooling show how a curriculum in an unfamiliar language, teachers from outside, and a calendar that ignores agricultural seasons produce drop-out; mother-tongue-based multilingual education (as piloted in Odisha), ashram (residential) schools and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (2009) are responses, and the National Education Policy (2020) recommends teaching in the home language in the early years. Nutrition (Chapter 26) is studied through household food allocation, food taboos and seasonality. Land alienation — the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals by sale, mortgage, fraud or acquisition — is studied through land records and oral histories and resisted by laws such as the Chotanagpur and Santal Parganas Tenancy Acts and the Andhra Pradesh Scheduled Areas Land Transfer Regulation. Bonded labour, forbidden by Article 23 and abolished by the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, persists in agriculture, brick kilns and quarries through debt; anthropologists have documented older forms such as hali in Gujarat and kamaiya in Nepal and supported rescue and rehabilitation. Housing: studies of slums, resettlement colonies and rural housing programmes (the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, 2015) examine whether designs fit family structure, livelihood and custom. Alternative economy covers reciprocity and barter, cooperatives, the commons, gift and solidarity economies and the collection of minor forest produce — economic forms that official statistics often miss. Livelihood studies use the sustainable livelihoods framework (Chambers and Conway, 1992; the British Department for International Development, 1999), in which people draw on five kinds of capital — human, natural, financial, physical and social — to pursue strategies within a context of vulnerability. Gender issues — the division of labour, access to land, violence, health — run through all of these. Relief, rehabilitation and relocation after disasters and displacement are studied through Cernea's risk model (Chapter 26), the Narmada and Sardar Sarovar controversies, and disaster anthropology after cyclones, floods, earthquakes and the 2004 tsunami; the Disaster Management Act (2005) frames the official response. Identity crisis refers to the stress of acculturation, displacement and migration, when younger people are caught between the values of their community and those of school, city and media. Communication covers development communication, from the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (1975–76) to community radio and mobile phones, and the need to use local languages and forms. Training and management means building local capacity — training village health workers, SHG leaders and panchayat members — and managing programmes with community participation. Ageing and the aged is a growing field: persons aged sixty and above were about 10.4 crore (8.6 per cent) in 2011; the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act (2007) and the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (first wave 2017–18) respond to changing families, migration of the young and the loneliness and dependence of the old.

India's development strategy was set for more than six decades by the Planning Commission (1950) and twelve Five-Year Plans (1951–2017), with annual plans between some of them; the Planning Commission was replaced by the NITI Aayog on 1 January 2015, and the plan era ended in 2017. Early plans relied on growth and the expectation that its benefits would "trickle down"; from the Fifth Plan (1974–79) the removal of poverty (garibi hatao) and area and group targeting became central. Sub-plans are the instruments of group targeting. The Tribal Sub-Plan (TSP), adopted in the Fifth Plan on the recommendation of an expert committee, requires Central ministries and States to earmark a share of plan outlays at least in proportion to the Scheduled Tribe population and to spend it in tribal areas, through ITDPs, MADA pockets and clusters. The Special Component Plan for Scheduled Castes, begun in the Sixth Plan (1979–80), was renamed the Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan (SCSP) in 2006 and follows the same principle of proportionate earmarking. Since the end of the Five-Year Plans the allocations have been reported in the Union Budget as Development Action Plans for Scheduled Castes and for Scheduled Tribes. Evaluations — including the Xaxa Committee (2014) — found that funds were often notional, diverted to general schemes or left unspent, and that tribal people had little say in how sub-plan money was used; several States (Andhra Pradesh in 2013, Telangana, Karnataka) have passed laws to make the sub-plans binding. Other area strategies include the Hill Area and Desert Development Programmes, the Drought Prone Areas Programme and the Aspirational Districts Programme (2018); the wider frame is set by the human development approach (the UNDP's Human Development Index, 1990, from the work of Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen) and the Sustainable Development Goals (2015). Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are voluntary, non-profit bodies independent of the state that work for public purposes. In India they are registered as societies (Societies Registration Act, 1860), trusts (Indian Trusts Act, 1882, and State public trust laws) or not-for-profit companies (Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013), and those receiving foreign funds are regulated by the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, tightened in 2020. They range from charitable and welfare bodies, through service-delivery and development organisations, to empowerment and advocacy organisations and community-based organisations of the poor themselves; well-known examples include the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA, 1972), Seva Mandir in Udaipur (1968), BAIF (1967), PRADAN (1983) and the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (1990), whose campaign led to the Right to Information Act (2005). Their roles include delivering services where the state is weak, innovating models later adopted by government, mobilising communities, advocacy and litigation, research and monitoring the state. Anthropology and NGOs meet in several ways: anthropologists work for and with NGOs, bringing ethnographic methods, local knowledge and evaluation; and anthropologists study NGOs as social forms. David Mosse's Cultivating Development (2005), an ethnography of a British-funded rainfed farming project among the Bhil of western India, showed how project policy and practice diverge and how success is produced by the networks that interpret a project; other studies examine donor dependence, the professionalisation of activism, accountability to beneficiaries versus funders, and the tensions between NGOs, social movements and the state.

Development thinking about women has passed through three approaches. Women in Development (WID), prompted by Ester Boserup's Woman's Role in Economic Development (1970), which showed that colonial and modern agricultural change had often reduced women's status, sought to integrate women into development projects. Women and Development (WAD) stressed that women had always been part of development and that the problem was the terms of their inclusion. Gender and Development (GAD), from the 1980s, turned attention to gender relations and power, and to transforming them. Empowerment, in Naila Kabeer's influential definition (1999), is the expansion of people's ability to make strategic life choices in a context where this ability was previously denied, and has three dimensions: resources (the preconditions), agency (the process of making choices, including negotiation and resistance) and achievements (the outcomes). In India the report Towards Equality (1974) of the Committee on the Status of Women in India showed declining sex ratios and women's marginalisation and gave the women's movement its evidence; the National Commission for Women (1992), one-third reservation in panchayats and municipalities (1992–93), the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005), the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act (2013), the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign (2015) and the Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023, which reserves one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies for women from the first delimitation after it comes into force, are among the institutional responses. The 2011 Census counted 943 women per 1,000 men and a child sex ratio of 918. Anthropology adds several cautions: that women's status varies with kinship, caste, class, region and religion; that matrilineal societies such as the Khasi, Garo and Nair are not matriarchies, though they give women distinctive rights; that SHGs (Chapter 24) and quotas can widen women's public role while household burdens remain; and that empowerment must be judged by women's own priorities. LGBT is an abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, often extended (LGBTQIA+) to include queer, intersex, asexual and other identities. Anthropologists have long documented that many societies recognise more than two genders or accept same-sex relations in particular forms: Two-Spirit people among Native North American nations (a term adopted in 1990, replacing the older outsider's term "berdache"), the fa'afafine of Samoa, and, in South Asia, the hijra, kinnar, aravani or thirunangai (Tamil Nadu, with the Koovagam festival), jogappa and others. Hijra communities are organised in guru–chela (teacher–disciple) households grouped into lineages called gharanas, with their own rules of initiation, kinship and livelihood — including blessing at births and weddings; their ethnography, from Serena Nanda's Neither Man nor Woman (1990) to Gayatri Reddy's With Respect to Sex (2005), shows how gender, sexuality, religion and economy intersect. Gilbert Herdt's Third Sex, Third Gender (1994) and Kath Weston's Families We Choose (1991) on lesbian and gay kinship broadened the field. Indian law has changed rapidly: in National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India (2014) the Supreme Court recognised transgender persons as a "third gender" with the right to self-identify their gender; in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India (2018) it decriminalised consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex by reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code; the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 prohibits discrimination and provides for certificates of identity, though activists criticised its procedure; and in Supriyo Chakraborty v. Union of India (2023) the Court declined to recognise a right to same-sex marriage, leaving the matter to Parliament, while affirming that queer persons must not face discrimination. The World Health Organization's ICD-11 (in effect from 2022) no longer classifies gender incongruence as a mental disorder. Anthropologists working with LGBT communities follow the ethics of self-identification, confidentiality and respect for people's own terms, and study discrimination in families, schools, workplaces and health care, the growth of community organisations, and the ways kinship is remade.