Deliver and Destroy? Communities and Access to Public Goods in India

While many of the current policy papers and documents underline the role of communities in delivering public goods and services—a phenomenon officially called communitization, this paper takes a different course and views communitization—not so much as an efficient mechanism for delivering public goods and services—but very much as a process that has its rebound effects on the communities themselves. It argues that the use of communities for the purpose of delivering public goods and services entails significant transformations in, if not the destruction of, these communities by seeking to answer the following questions: How do the existing policy documents view the instrumentality of communities? What changes does communitization introduce to the social life of the communities that are sought to be rendered instrumental for the delivery of public goods and services? Do communities remain the same as they gear up for the task? The paper thus pushes the delivery project beyond its narrow, instrumentalist and albeit economistic understanding with the help of a series of ethnographic studies conducted by us since the beginning of this new millennium in various parts of India’s east and the northeast. The ethnographies cited here were conducted in the villages of Nagaland, on mainly the poor and marginalized sections of victims displaced as a result of riverbank erosion in the northern and north-central districts of Maldah and Murshidabad, respectively, in West Bengal, on sections of adivasi informal mining labour of Keonjhar and the scheduled caste villagers of Karadabani in Nayagarh—the last two in Odisha. The paper concludes by arguing that the community may be viewed as a veritable site of contest between the communitized communities, on the one hand, and the forces resisting it, on the other.