Empowering through entitlement? The micro-politics of food access in rural Maharashtra, India

Journal of Rural Studies 45 (2016) 260e269

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Empowering through entitlement? The micro-politics of food access in rural Maharashtra, India Pronoy Rai a, Thomas A. Smucker b, * a Department of Geography & Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois, 255 Computing Applications Building, MC-150, 605 East Springfield Avenue, Champaign, IL 61820, USA b Department of Geography, Ohio University, Clippinger 111, Athens, OH 45701, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 5 June 2015 Received in revised form 18 February 2016 Accepted 7 April 2016 Available online 19 April 2016

In this paper, we examine the interplay of entitlement and empowerment through qualitative research on the micropolitics of two social protection programs in rural Maharashtra, India. The case study assesses the implications of the expansion of state space into a rural society through such programs and argues that hitherto existing social relations and micropolitics in villages produce differentiated biopolitical outcomes. Extending Amartya Sen's entitlement and capabilities frameworks, we contribute to the discussion on the relationship and distinctions between entitlement and empowerment by situating social protection programs within the ambit of technologies of biopower that are aimed at sustaining “make-live” conditions for certain populations. Our fieldwork in western India in 2012e2013 demonstrates the following: first, entitlements must be claimed and the ability to realize one's entitlements -vis the local administration that adrequires a minimal form of empowerment in village society vis-a ministers entitlement programs. Second, we claim that state-led entitlement programs when introduced at the village level, encounter micro-politics that produce patronage relationships and blur the distinction between legal and extra-legal means of accessing food entitlements. We conclude by outlining the limits of an entitlement approach to social protection, especially in relation to the potential for empowerment of marginalized social groups. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Social protection Entitlement Empowerment Micro-politics Food access India

1. Introduction Once derided as unnecessary market distortion, social protection has emerged rapidly over the last decade as a key tool of mainstream development policy at least in part because of its palatability from a range of development perspectives (Devereux, 2001; Norton et al., 2001). Economic liberals frame social protection as an alternative to wider “safety nets” that could moderate inequality without fundamentally altering a growth-oriented approach to development (Holzmann et al., 2003; World Bank, 2011). A stronger state interventionist perspective views social protection as a concrete extension of a rights-based approach to development, with potential for wider transformation and empowerment (Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler, 2007). With mainstream social protection framed primarily around prevention of deprivation through delivery of entitlements, the potential for

* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (P. Rai), [email protected] (T.A. Smucker). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.04.002 0743-0167/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

social protection programs to contribute toward empowerment of the socially and politically marginalized is the subject of considerable debate globally (Cecchini and Martinez, 2011; Devereux and White, 2010). In this paper, we examine the expansion of state space into rural societies through transfer entitlements and argue that hitherto existing social relations and micro-politics in villages produce differentiated biopolitical outcomes. We begin by examining how rights, equity, and power are implicated in the making and evolution of entitlement set in rural India. Following Foucault (1997), we understand biopolitics as the state's control apparatus over a population using “technologies” that allow populations to live (or not). In contrast to other technologies of power examined by Foucault, biopower is concerned with forms of power employed to manage the health and well-being of populations (De Larrinaga and Doucet, 2008). Since the 18th century, biopower can be observed in the administrative management of living conditions through interventions in a broad range of social and environmental domains (e.g., public health, family planning, crime management). We situate social protection programs within the ambit of these

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technologies of biopower that are aimed at sustaining “make-live” conditions for certain populations (Li, 2010). Through an analysis of the micro-politics of entitlement, we show how biopolitics encounters the messy world of peasant society. Drawing on Sen's entitlement framework (Sen, 1993, 1977), we seek to demonstrate how entitlements are reconfigured under social protection and state support for agrarian modernization and how those reconfigured entitlements are asserted within local micro-politics. We argue that a biopolitical lens on entitlements is useful in assessing the limits of social protection programs that focus on expanding entitlements without explicitly addressing questions of rights and power that are central to empowerment. Viewing entitlement programs as biopolitical technologies allows us to observe the operationalization of political society (Chatterjee, 2008) within which we see limited progress toward the empowerment of marginalized rural laborers. We analyze the workings of a social protection program at the local level e the longstanding subsidized food grains distribution program known as the Public Distribution System (PDS). PDS has served as a primary example of large-scale entitlement protection for many other countries. In focusing on this program, we examine the local micro-politics of social protection programs that derive primarily from initiatives of national government rather than donor agendas (Hickey, 2009). More broadly, our analysis of the interplay of entitlement and empowerment through a biopolitical lens responds to the call from many development studies scholars to “bring politics back in” (Bebbington et al., 2008; Whitehead and Gray-Molina, 2003). While greater attention has been paid to the role of the state in shaping development (Corbridge, 2005) and broadly to the role of institutions in development processes (Houtzager and Moore, 2005), there is an enduring need to examine the various roles of the state in mediating patron-client relations within evolving rural moral economies. Through qualitative research on the local micro-politics of the entitlement program, our paper assesses the empowerment potential of social protection programs, especially their ability to address questions of rights and equity (Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler, 2007). Our fieldwork in rural Maharashtra state, India in 2012e2013 demonstrates the following: first, entitlements must be claimed and the ability to realize one's entitlements requires a minimal -vis the local form of empowerment in village society vis-a administration that administers entitlement programs. Conversely, Sharma (2011: 973) has claimed that “for those who subsist and struggle on the edges of society”, empowerment is meaningless in the absence of minimal entitlements. Drawing on both insights, we argue that entitlement and empowerment are indeed entwined but the particular experience of reconfigured entitlements that we present in our case study site produces a truncated version of empowerment. Second, we claim that state-led entitlement programs when introduced at the village level, encounter micropolitics that produce patronage relationships and blur the distinction between legal and extra-legal means of accessing food entitlements. By illuminating the multiple sources of power that play a role in negotiating access to entitlements, our qualitative research provides further evidence that people do not experience the state as a monolith (Gupta, 2012), but rather encounter the state as an assemblage of interests, experts, techniques, and discourses (Li, 2005: 386). We conclude by outlining the limits of an entitlement approach to social protection, especially in relation to the potential for empowerment of marginalized social groups. 2. The making of entitlements Theorization of the causes of famines and hunger has placed a particular importance on the study of entitlements (Sen, 1981;

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Devereux, 2001). Entitlements are a “set of alternative commodity bundles, over which a person can establish command, given the prevailing legal, political and economic arrangements” Sen (1984: 497). The entitlement approach aims to describe all legal sources of food that can be grouped into four categories: “production-based entitlement” (growing food), “trade-based entitlement” (purchasing food), “own-labor entitlement” (working for food), and “inheritance and transfer entitlement” (being given food by others). Importantly, transfer entitlement include both culturally-based forms of transfer (e.g., kinship-based food sharing networks) and the kinds of politically-based transfer entitlements provided by governments via social protection programs. Individuals starve if their full entitlement set does not provide them with adequate food to live. Analysis of major instances of 20th century famine from West Africa to South Asia has demonstrated that loss of entitlements often reflects caste, class, and gendered dimensions of food access among differentiated peasant and pastoralist populations (Sen, 1981). Empirical work from this perspective has highlighted the inability of specific groups of people to acquire food through their entitlement set, even when food production and overall availability of food are sufficient on a per capita basis (Devereux, 1988; Sen, 1981). Such results have informed the recent growth of social protection programs designed to buffer populations suffering from chronic food security from loss of food entitlements. Entitlements may be seen as politically constructed in at least two ways. They reflect local inequalities in endowments such as access to land and water, the availability of wage labor opportunities, and the cultural politics of solidarity and food sharing. Secondly, through particular state interventions, social protection has expanded the range of entitlements ostensibly for those who are most vulnerable to the loss of all other means of accessing food with varying impacts at the local level and without explicitly addressing the underlying structural features that put them in this position. Given these political dimensions of entitlements, individuals who are legally entitled but incapable of benefitting from their entitlement set exist in a certain relational sense with those who retain sufficient food entitlements. Following Watts (1991), in other words, if socially differentiated lack of command over food is made visible during famines or in everyday existence of hunger, attention needs to be paid to power, politics, and rights that are situated in a multiplicity of arenas that range from the private space of household to the nation/state. Specifically, we interpret Watts's critique of the entitlement framework as a call to more carefully examine the micro-politics of politically-based transfer entitlements, which we understand to reflect a concern for differentiated and sometimes latent strategies to subvert, modify, or adapt to policies or institutions in a local context (Corbridge, 2005). Our research examines the functioning of entitlements in a democracy with a less pronounced donor presence and a strong civil society, and where it is claimed that social protection is key to shaping the social contract between citizens and government (Devereux and McGregor, 2014). Indeed, the role of the state in making “surplus” populations live by activating various biopolitical technologies e interventions to enhance the well-being and health of populations e has been discussed previously (Li, 2009). We do not wish to posit the rural laborers and farmers of Maharashtra as hapless subjects of biopolitics, but we do wish to point to the political society that envelope the objects of that state's social protection programs. We are attentive to the critiques of biopolitics as applied to theorizations of the state in rural India, especially to the claim that a biopolitical optic depoliticizes poverty and the class character of differential entitlements (Harriss and Jeffrey, 2013). Rather than depoliticize entitlement, we use the notion of biopower to better understand the complex interplay of entitlement

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and empowerment in the state's practice of development in rural India. In this research, we employ a biopolitical lens to understand social protection in rural India because the “right to life” that biopolitics seeks to achieve translates to a limited notion of empowerment that we highlight in this research. Biopolitics or regulation of population through interventions such as social security is operationalized on the ground in terms of both “making live” or “letting die” of certain populations. The latter is often understood to be the consequence of the wrong policies or ineffective implementation of policies (Fassin, 2009; 54). While the state is adequately accounted for in studies of biopolitics, in our case study we show that the activation of biopolitics happens within a context of rural moral economy which means that “making live” and “letting die” (Li, 2009) are not reducible to the state's prerogative alone. Political society, according to Chatterjee (2008: 57), includes large sections of the rural populations that “make their claims on the government … not within the framework of stable constitutionally defined rights and laws, but rather through temporary, contextual, and unstable arrangements arrived at through direct political negotiations.” These political negotiations are the local micro-politics that render some farmers and laborers capable of benefitting from entitlements. Critics argue that Chatterjee's notion of political society provides limited scope for recognition of agency in subaltern politics (Gudavarthy and Vijay, 2012), and renders opaque the violence of the state that mars everyday rural life in political society (Baviskar and Sundar, 2008). However, we find the notion of political society compelling to this research in that the “overwhelming fact about rural politics in India … is the steady widening and deepening of the web of governmentality, not merely as technology but as practices of everyday life among rural people” (Chatterjee, 2012: 317). We locate the workings of contemporary political society within the historical evolution of the Indian state's role in food access. The existence of politically-based transfer entitlements in India reflects an anti-famine contract that compels the state to act to avoid famine (de Waal, 1997). This anti-famine contract emerged through various crises of colonial rule. Independent India inherited a narrow contract that required state action to avoid famine, but not necessarily to take action to address chronic malnutrition or processes that produce it. During the 20th century, famine relief emerged as a civil right via an anti-famine contract, though a narrow one that did not require the state to root out underlying processes leading to collapse of entitlements nor was it required to act to end chronic (as opposed to acute) malnutrition. The Indian government adapted and extended the food rationing scheme in 1946 inherited from the colonial government. No country in the world, with the exception of the then Soviet Union, had controlled basic food distribution at this scale and indeed by 1946, the rationing scheme covered almost 800 Indian cities and towns (Amrith, 2008: 1028.) As a social protection program, PDS enters this less clearly defined territory of the Indian state's obligation to address structural and chronic malnutrition. We seek to extend this discussion by assessing the local micro-politics of access to politically-based transfer entitlements that have been a hallmark of recent state development efforts in India. 3. The politics of entitlement and empowerment While the notion of entitlement typically denotes a guarantee of access to material resources, empowerment has entered development discourse with a wider range of meanings that span the instrumentalist concerns of mainstream development agencies and the social transformational if not revolutionary aims of social movements (Parpart et al., 2002). Gupta (1995) argues that the

machinery of development focuses on the goal of delivering entitlements in order to remove all discussions of empowerment from development discourse. Thus, entitlement has the potential to preempt broader structural changes, especially where empowerment may be narrowly conceived as “capacity to make choices” without full consideration of how individuals’ choices are constrained through class, gender, and political hierarchies. A more narrowly conceived notion of empowerment as precursor for marginalized groups to contest and win entitlements has been alluded to in scholarship that critiques the entitlement framework. State-enforced laws and, in general, rule-orders are continuously unmade, remade, and transformed (Falk, 1983). In critiquing bureaucratic positivism, Schaffer (1975) and Schaffer and Wen-hsien (1975) focus on the rules governing a person's command over goods and services officially provided through administrative provisioning, rather than through the market. They identify rules of access (corresponding to the rules of entitlement) that include, “admission rules” through which a person can demonstrate eligibility for a benefit or service; “line rules” through which a person's priority in a queue is recognized; and “counter rules” (counter here being referred to as a fixture across which business is conducted) that control the actual exchange between the official and applicant for the service or benefit. Gore (1993: 452) argues for a need for entitlement analysis to incorporate the analysis of relations of power and discursive practices, and the need to view the workings of moral rules in tandem with power relations and the communication of meaning. The moral economy of provisioning and what we call the micropolitics of entitlement to food are closely connected in the socioecological context of this research. In the drylands of India, the numbers of landless agricultural laborers exceed those of landed peasants. This research details how the role of the state in food provisioning (transfer entitlements) has become increasingly important relative to other forms of patron-client relations that ensured access to food for the landless laborers in the years past. The ability of who is able to access food rations with or without the approval of the state is determined by the micro-politics of entitlement. The micro-politics of entitlement that we document in this research are determined by the relations of caste, class, and gender that produce the moral economy of provisioning in a rural context. When socially accepted moral rules diverge from the legal rules, people engage in a pattern of legitimate, but illegal, exchange practices. Indeed, all members of a society may not share the moral rules (that constitute the moral economy) and they vary temporally and spatially (Gore, 1993: 445e451). For Sen, however, moral economy (c.f. Scott, 1976; Thompson, 1971) is an informal insurance system that guarantees a certain minimum welfare. This understanding contrasts with Gore's view (1993: 446) that moral rules do not necessarily conform to Sen's “particular welfarist morality”. Thus, for Gore, Sen's view obscures the interaction between moral economy and the state, which restricts the possibility to understand the myriad ways in which entitlement programs are reworked in rural setting and the changes that moral economies undergo as a consequence of the introduction of such programs. Recognition of the existence of particular moral economies enables an understanding of why certain groups of people live through famines or avoid chronic hunger over the long term, and others do not. Such moral economies have been shown to be characterized by the use of solidarity networks as well as opportunistic behavior (Fafchamps, 1992), but at their core are concerned with marginalized peoples’ notions of justice and expectations related to the provision of entitlements by the state or elites. Such expectations are dynamic and may evolve in light of external political and economic influences (Edelman, 2005). Through the rest of this paper, we will draw upon on our

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qualitative field research to examine the workings of PDS in India and analyze the interplay of empowerment and entitlement gleaned from an understanding of the impact of local power structures on state-mediated processes of development. 4. Methods and study area background This work is part of a larger project that addresses (a) variation in endowments and entitlements across various rural livelihood groups, and (b) the role of micro-politics and the state in producing the observed patterns of endowments and entitlements. In this paper, we focus on the second concern related to micro-politics and the state. The data for this project were collected during JuneeAugust of 2012 and July 2013 in a village in the Umarked taluk in Yavatmal district of Maharashtra state. The population of Maharashtra is 112.4 million. In the state, 27 percent of the population is undernourished and around 37 per cent of children under the age of five are underweight (IFPRI, 2008). The role of PDS is therefore, quite central to livelihood concerns of people in the rural areas of Maharashtra. This is also evident from the fact that in rural Maharashtra, PDS contributes to around 35 percent of rice consumed in the households, 30 percent of wheat, 8 percent of sugar, and 74 percent of kerosene for household fuel (Government of India, (2015)). The major data collection activities undertaken were a household survey and extensive qualitative key informant interviews. A survey of 70 households in a village in Umarkhed taluk provided data on the orientation of livelihoods, including major livelihood endowments that are converted to food entitlements. The stratified random sample ensured representation of all major livelihood groups, including agriculturalists, agricultural laborers, and nonagricultural laborers. Around a fourth of all agricultural and nonagricultural laborers interviewed for this research were from the indigenous communities (clustered together under the sociopolitical category of “Scheduled Tribes” in India). Semi-structured key informant interviews focused on the experiences of officials in the local state apparatus and functionaries such as the managers of public food distribution shops. Umarkhed is a rural sub-district (called, “taluk” in Maharashtra) spread over 1248 square kilometers and is home to around 212,000 people. Close to 35 percent of the population is of lower castes (called “Schedule castes” in India) or are indigenous. Among “Main Workers”1 that are around 98,470 people, close to 32 percent of the adult population identify themselves as “cultivators” or agriculturists, 60 percent as “agricultural laborers”, and 8 percent are nonagricultural workers. Among “Marginal Workers” (approximately 8570 people), 13 percent of the workers are agriculturists. A similar percentage are non-agricultural rural laborers and 74 percent are agricultural laborers (Registrar General of India, (2014)). According to our household survey, the average landholding among the survey respondents varied from no land ownership for all indigenous laborers to 5.6 ha for agriculturists. The average number of household laborers varied from five in indigenous and non-agricultural rural households, and seven in agricultural and agricultural laborer households. In terms of the key assets, livestock ownership varied from an average of four cattle and no ruminants owned by agriculturists to no cattle and two ruminants owned by indigenous laborers. The agricultural and non-agricultural laborers each owned an average of one cattle and one ruminant.

1 In India, those workers who had worked for the major part of the reference period (i.e. 6 months or more) are termed as main workers. Those workers who had not worked for the major part of the reference period (i.e. less than 6 months) are termed as marginal workers.

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Approximately 45 percent of the agriculturists, 40 percent of indigenous laborers, 34 percent of non-agricultural rural laborers, and 11 percent of agricultural laborers did not own PDS cards. The qualitative data from these interviews provide a picture into the functioning of the Public Distribution System. PDS has received both praise and criticism. In states where PDS is being implemented relatively effectively, it has been credited for reducing food inseze and curity and having ripple effects on poverty reduction (Dre Sen, 2013: 199e212). Subsidized (or, in certain cases, free) food grains can be obtained by citizens in possession of PDS cards (also called, “ration cards”) from fair price shops (also called, “ration shops”). Currently, in Maharashtra, five types of ration cards are issued to targeted population groups: Annapurna cards to destitute senior citizens; Antyoday Anna Yojana cards to landless laborers and marginal farmers; yellow/Below Poverty Line (BPL) ration cards to households with an annual income lower than INR 15,000 (~USD 221); saffron ration cards to households with annual incomes in the range of INR.15, 000 and INR 100,000 (~USD 1473); and white ration cards (or Above Poverty Line, or APL cards) to households with annual income greater than INR 100,000. In rural Maharashtra, 19 percent of households have no ration cards, 48 percent have APL or Annapurna cards, 28 percent have BPL cards, and 7 percent have Antyoday cards (Government of India, (2015)). In Yavatmal district, one of the more detailed surveys of the functioning of PDS was conducted by the Maharashtra government-supported Vidarbha Statutory Development Board (2012). This survey intended to understand the functioning of PDS in villages with significant indigenous populations (called “scheduled areas” in India) in five districts of eastern Maharashtra, including in Yavatmal. The survey was conducted only among owners of PDS cards and in this report brought out by the government, it was found that close to half of the PDS card holders in the districts were dissatisfied with the PDS system on account of the quality and quantity of food grains supplied. Media reports have, in addition, pointed to cases of starvation in the indigenous areas of Yavatmal district due to non-supply of PDS grains (Pawar: 13 June 2013). Starvation deaths due to failure of the PDS in eastern Maharashtra have also been brought to the attention of the Bombay High Court through a public interest litigation (IANS, 2015). 5. Reconfiguration of entitlement set in Umarkhed taluk In this section, we use our survey and qualitative data to characterize the changes in Umarkhed taluk as a consequence of stateled development and its impact on reconfiguration in entitlements of major livelihood groups. The varying entitlement sets that we find among farmers and landless agricultural laborers in Umarkhed have been produced through both state investments in agriculture and the expansion of politically-based transfer entitlements. Following Chatterjee's (2004) conceptualization of political society mentioned previously in the paper, we characterize the process of development in the village as reconfiguration of entitlements involving assertion of limited forms of empowerment within local micro-politics. Farming households in Umarkhed constitute approximately 20 percent of the population. They cultivate soybean, lentils, sugarcane, vegetables, wheat, cotton, and sorghum, though variety and quantity of crops grown reflect the size of a farmer's landholding and access to irrigation, with land poorer farmers concentrating narrowly on lentils and vegetables primarily for their own consumption. Table 1 details the land holdings of farmers and laborers interviewed for this research. While the differences between livelihood groups are apparent in the access to land, the range of holdings within the agriculturist group are also notable. Limited access to land means that many of

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P. Rai, T.A. Smucker / Journal of Rural Studies 45 (2016) 260e269 Table 1 Land holdings by livelihood group, Umarkhed, Maharashtra state. Livelihood group

Land holding (average; ha)

Land holding (range; ha)

Agriculturists (n ¼ 12) Agricultural laborers (n ¼ 31) Non-agricultural laborers (n ¼ 12) Indigenous laborers (n ¼ 13)

5.6 0.4 0.8 0

0.6e20.2 0e1.6 0e3.2 0e0

the landowning households do not merely depend on their production-based entitlement to access food. Access to water for most agriculturalists is an additional constraint. Water for agriculture is accessed by farmers either from bore wells in their fields or from a state-owned water reservoir close to the village, which requires a license and proximity to a canal which transferred water from the reservoir to the village. The wealthiest agriculturists purchase diesel-operated generators to access this water or water from their own borewells, since the electricity supply from the state-owned electricity transmission company is erratic. The village is, therefore, home to a highly differentiated peasantry whose food access reflects a mix of production, market, and transfer-based entitlements. This differentiation is consistent with inequity in land ownership in rural Maharashtra: close to 45 percent of people in rural Maharashtra do not own any land other than homestead while the Gini coefficient of rural land ownership in the state is close to 0.7 (Rawal, 2008). The majority of the population consists of landless agricultural laborers who depend on a more narrow set of market and transfer entitlements. They earn wages which they exchange for food, either in the markets, in PDS stores, or the few small grocery stores in the village. Non-agricultural laboring opportunities in the village include working as a construction laborer to build and repair houses, wells, roads, drinking water pipelines, and sewage pipelines. For agricultural and non-agricultural laborers, market-based food entitlements had become even more important as a result of increased wage dependency, market integration, and greater interaction with the local administration. Both groups found increased state-led development and agricultural intensification over the past several years helpful in earning higher wages. As an indigenous laborer explained, with increased dependence on alternative sources of water for irrigation such as wells and boreholes, there was an increase in the number of rounds of crops cultivated every year. Along with some increase in the wages paid out to laborers due to increased labor needs, this also meant the ability to sell more labor to agriculturists, and, therefore, increased earnings. For some laborers, the current entitlement set reflects the culmination of a broad livelihood shift whereby forest-dependent populations have become agricultural laborers, resulting in changes in diet and family organization that reflect state-led modernization. Those who transitioned from a forest resourcebased livelihood have exchanged greater diversity of food for a new entitlement set that provides access to a more limited array of food commodities. As an indigenous laborer explained: My father used to live in the forest, and cut trees and sell them. I was able to at least get primary school-level education, and then send my children to study in higher grades. But in our community, things are still bad. Illiteracy is a big problem; most people in our community still live in forested areas, where people like you don't come to do survey or to help deliver any state service. The construction of forest-based livelihood as a pre-modern existence reflects the penetration of statist discourse of

development and biopower in the everyday lives of rural laborers. More importantly, it tells us of an experience of truncated nature of empowerment that has accompanied their departure from dependence on common property resources to increased dependence on transfer entitlements. Second, farming households have diversified and rely increasingly on non-farm sources of income; both better-off and land-poor farmers have been sending children to schools, often subsidized by state support, and the children have gone on to seek employment in the non-agricultural sector in rural and urban areas. An agricultural laborer provided a highly nuanced understanding of increased dependence on transfer entitlements: During my childhood, we didn't have to pay so much. Everything gets expensive really fast now. So, we were better off in the old days. We never had PDS shops then, but agriculturists would allow us to take away a part of the produce that we would grow for them. Those grains used to be of good quality. We would grow lentils, sorghum, and rice, and we would bring back a portion of what we would grow. You don't get all that in the PDS store, do you? Changes in patron-client relations meant a greater role for the state in the rural moral economy at the cost of a wider nutrition basket that was accessible to the rural laborers. The transformation of the agrarian landscape from sharecropping to pure wage labor clearly had an impact on agricultural laborers’ food entitlements. Agriculturists identify significant changes in endowments with implications for food production. For instance, expanded access to irrigation had given way to increased replacement of sorghum with wheat cultivation. The increase in the quantity and variety of production (from sorghum, to wheat and lentils) was credited to the construction of a large village tank and the electrification of the village. This is in tandem with the trend in the rest of Maharashtra (Planning Department, Maharashtra: 2015): production of sorghum has reduced from 4.2 million tonnes in 1960e61 to 2.5 million tonnes in 2013e14, while in the same period, the production of wheat increased from 401,000 tonnes to 1.6 million tonnes and the production of lentils increased from 989,000 tonnes to 3.2 million tonnes. The gross irrigated area in the state has increased from 1.2 million hectares in 1960e61 to 4 million hectares in 2009e10 as the consumption of electricity in agriculture in the state has increased from 15 million Kwh to 21,725 million Kwh in the same period. Additionally, state-supported introduction of irrigation had brought the cultivation of cash crops (e.g., cotton) that earned greater returns to cultivators and a general increase in household sizes meant greater labor endowment with households, and probably inadvertently, a complete change in the agrarian landscape from sharecropping to wage labor. Our assessment found that landowners across all livelihood groups most often cited improved food access as a result of statesupported interventions in the village, such as construction of irrigation canals and electrification in the village. Additionally, the better-off farmers attribute this to enhanced endowments, such as access to technical education and higher incomes that allow for investments to increase land productivity. Additionally, access to increased cash savings made it possible for several landowners to

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make access to employment in the manufacturing or service industry possible for the children of the households. These sectors provided steadier sources of supplementary income to the households. Farmers also identify increased returns for their produce from the market as a source of improved food access as a result of the recent food price rises that have led to greatly decreased food access for those dependent on exchange entitlement in this village as elsewhere in India (CENTAD, 2008). Prices of vegetables in India, for instance, have increased from 33.4 in 1991 to 149.4 in 2012 on the FAO Producer Price Index (FAO, 2015) For many agricultural laborers, the prioritizing of expenditure on food has meant little, if any, ability of the laborers to spend on other household necessities. Several fundamental shifts in livelihood were discussed in this section. Each of them has led to reliance on reconfigured entitlement sets for accessing food. First, the introduction of politicallyebased transfer entitlements via the PDS had changed ways of accessing food for formerly forest-dependent households: increased penetration of capitalist agriculture and local cultural shifts had resulted in an agrarian regime shift from sharecropping to wage labor, rendering laborers dependent on lower quality and fewer varieties of grains from the PDS stores. Second, the village had undergone macro changes in technologies that had impacted agricultural production in the village. The state had electrified the village, had sponsored construction of a large irrigation tank, and was providing access to the tank through canals. Additionally, several bore wells had come up in the village. Agriculturalists claimed that increased productivity of crops came through additional rounds of crop production and agriculturists also claimed to be getting better returns for their produce from the markets. Indeed, deepening capitalist agriculture is benefitting large landowners and capitalist farmers most, while rendering the majority of the laboring poor more dependent on state-based transfer entitlements in order to access food. Narratives presented by farmers and landless laborers in Umarkhed are in line with longstanding arguments of agrarian studies scholars that the overall dynamic of capitalist development in rural India has advanced peasant differentiation and created a greater divide between the rural rich, such as landlords and a rapidly diversifying upper strata of peasants, and the majority of the rural peasantry, which consists of agricultural workers and poor peasants (Lerche, 2013: 388). Development has impacted the entitlement set of different livelihood groups unevenly with agriculturists most clearly benefiting from state programs that expand their entitlement set while the majority seeks access to a very narrowly defined entitlement under programs such as PDS. Indeed, the story of a modernizing Indian village that we narrated here is that of an expanding state space with differential impact on the entitlements of the landed agriculturists and landless laborers. However, the co-existence of care and structural violence in India as outcomes of biopolitics are not necessarily entirely incongruent (Gupta, 2012: 23). The technologies of government highlighted here are central to the practice of biopolitics by the Indian state. As the field of biopower penetrates villages and rural populations, we find that the ability to claim transfer entitlements continues to depend on one's relatively privileged position in the multiple axes of social power relations. For instance, Chatterjee (2008: 55) points out that during the last two decades social protection as state policy has sought to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation while allowing for forms of primitive accumulation to continue. The small peasants and laborers of our field village fit neatly into Chatterjee's (2004) conceptualization of political society (as distinct from civil society). For Chatterjee, the state regards people in civil society as proper citizens possessing rights, while those in the political society are seen as belonging to particular

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population groups, “with specific empirically established and statistically described characteristics, which are targets of particular governmental policies” (Chatterjee, 2008, 58).

6. PDS and the micro-politics of access to transfer entitlements This sub-section provides a narrative on the process of conversion of endowments into politicallyebased transfer entitlements (e.g. through acquisition of PDS cards), in order to explain how villagers accessed subsidized grains provided by the Indian state. We seek to explain how “extraelegal” ways of obtaining food and micro-politics in the village produce locally differentiated biopolitical outcomes. Access to food from ration shops requires ownership of a ration card issued by the Indian government. However, laborers report accessing food from the two ration shops in the village without owning any cards. An agriculturist who did not own a ration card bought household fuel from the local ration shop because he claimed that the PDS shop owner was his friend: “we're all from the same village, so he give us 2e5 L of kerosene every month”, he claimed. Similarly, indigenous households that did not own cards were able to access arbitrary quantities of food grains from the ration shop. A household patriarch explains the variation in prices offered to different buyers: The dealer sells us bags of grains because we're all from the same village, after all. But I can't get anything legally. Once he's done selling grain bags to people who have cards, he sells some of the remaining ones to us. He sells the bags to us at a higher rate because we don't own a card. But then, people who own cards also buy grains at higher prices. It would be shortsighted to dismiss such narratives on the extralegal ways of accessing food as yet another anecdote of small-scale corruption in the countryside. In the light of failure of the state to adequately entitle all rural households, we note the ways through which transfer entitlement programs encounter rural micropolitics. Further, nuclear households that are related to each other share PDS grains with each other to help households that did not own ration cards. Thus, while extended families present themselves to the local administration as multiple nuclear family units, indigenous households in particular practiced extensive food sharing within extended family networks. As one indigenous respondent asserts the importance of such sharing networks: “If and when, he [respondent's father] would give us a share of grains from what he would buy from the PDS store, only then we would get affordable grains to eat.” Laborers who did not own PDS cards were sold grains at rates and quantity that were different from the state-mandated rates and quantity.2 Since PDS shops did not have enough grains stored all through the month, it was important for PDS card holders to buy the grain sacks when they were available in the shops. People who did not have enough savings to buy the grain sacks when these were available in the shops were denied their entitlement. Evidence of denial of subsidized grains to people in villages in other parts of India due to lack of ownership of PDS cards, lack of money

2 In Maharashtra, households living below the poverty line are expected to pay INR 5.00 per kilogram of wheat, and INR 6.00 per kilogram of rice to buy grains from fair price shops. The “poorest of the poor” are also expected to receive 35 kg of food grain from fair price shops, but are expected to pay INR 2.00 per kilogram for wheat and INR 3.00 per kilogram for rice, while indigent senior citizens are provided with 10 kg of food free of cost.

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to buy subsidized grains, or discriminatory treatment by PDS dealers has been documented by other researchers (Mooij, 2001; Khera, 2008). In her study of the functioning of PDS is rural Bihar and Jharkhand states in India, Mooij (2001: 3290e3295) documents how villagers were able to access PDS grains by organizing under the leadership of the local unit of the Communist Party or due to the goodwill of local media, urban activists, or the occasional bureaucrat. The awarding or denial of access to social protection programs for specific populations by the state and other political actors has been documented by researchers. De Neve and Carswell (2011: 3e4), for instance, elucidate how different political affiliations of a local panchayat and lower caste laborers in a village in Tamil Nadu state in India led to the denial of access to a wage-forwork program for the laborers, although the coverage of the program in Tamil Nadu is fairly deep (Ministry of Rural Development, India: 2014). Entitlements, in the legal sense, coexist with extra-legal ways of accessing food. However, ‘legal’ and ‘extra-legal’ are categories constructed by the state through biopolitics. Poverty owes both to representations of and by the state (Gupta, 2012: 58.) State projects of legibility and simplification (Scott, 1998) construct categories such as poverty lines and construct populations as being “below” and “above” the poverty line. This process does not merely help the state for its biopolitical purposes, it also constructs the “state” differently for different categories of people (Gupta, 2012: 58), from the lens of how they “see the state”. While we wish to point to a subaltern moral economy based in networks of solidarity that helps the poor to survive by manipulating government schemes, we also emphasize the existence of certain populations, such as indigenous households, outside of Chatterjee's (2004) political society that remain peripheral to state's biopolitical technologies of management. Critiques of Chatterjee's conceptualization of political society claim that people in the political society who lack political conron nections are reduced to a fate of poverty and powerlessness (Ve et al., 2003). While we do not necessarily disagree with this critique, we seek to emphasize that the actualization of statesupported entitlements in villages happens within the context of rural moral economy based in pre-existing social relations. 7. Entitlements for the landless and the “cardless” In order to understand the means of asserting access to reconfigured entitlements, we turn to the micro-politics of access to and exclusion from transfer entitlements provided through the PDS system. We explore why some people did not own ration cards and the rationale for denying them cards by those who had the power to issue them as reflective of biopolitics and its limits in a rural society. In so doing, we identify the limited nature of empowerment associated with peoples’ attempts to assert access to entitlements under contemporary social protection schemes. Biopolitics involves the identification of sections of a population to whose welfare the state commits itself. On the other hand, this process of selection also excludes certain populations. Such exclusions are reflected in the experiences of villagers who attempted to access local bureaucracy and followed bureaucratic procedures, but were not successful in securing cards. One indigenous laborer claimed, I went to the Tehsildar.3 He said that they are not distributing ration cards any moreethat they are not available. I even got signatures of some other people who don't own the card on a petition, but he

3 A Tehsildar (Urdu language) is a provincial bureaucrat, in-charge of sub-district (tehsil) level revenue administration matters.

(Tehsildar) did not accept our petition. When I ask the (PDS) dealer, he tells me that he would need INR 2000 to get the card. Now, where do we get that money from? The development state, for the indigenous laborer, is embodied in the Tehsildar. Accessing the state means accessing local state actors and it is with considerable difficultly that landless laborers can access a local bureaucrat like the Tehsildar. Other researchers have highlighted, albeit in urban Indian contexts, marginalized peoples' invoking of the “Right to Information Act” to circumvent bureaucratic inaction and apathy, in order to secure PDS cards (Peisakhin and Pinto, 2010). The application of a biopolitical lens, however, precludes an understanding of populations beyond subjects (of development, in this case). For instance, his friend from the same community added, “I also signed the petition, which we took to the Tehsildar. But I sometimes think that I should have got the petition attested by the Tehsildar, before bringing it back. Now, he didn't do anything with the petition but at least we would have had a record with us that we did try to petition him. He just turned us awayehe said that we didn't have the appropriate documents. I had got the Sarpanch4 to attest the petition, bought and pasted a revenue stamp on the petition, but the Tehsildar still returned the form to us.” Accessing the schemes also means navigating relations of power with state officials who control these schemes e from the Sarpanch and PDS dealer to the Tehsildar. Remedying one's cardless status was pursued in a number of ways. People with little access to social networks were asked to bribe their way to the schemes even when they had little or no money. Laborers attempt to utilize every alternative channel that exists, for example petitioning their casteerepresentative in the village council. In order to achieve the objectives of decentralization of governance in India, the panchayats were mandated to elect one representative amongst members of each of the major caste categories during the panchayat election cycle. A rural, non-agricultural laborer's narrative reflects the limits of laborers' ability to negotiate access to entitlements in a functioning democracy. Our casteerepresentative was elected just two years ago. He doesn't care about us anymore. The PDS dealer told us that people in the Tehsil office need to be offered least INR 1000e1500 to sign off on our PDS card. We are living our lives in hardship. We earn and spend our wages on food and children's education, and rarely have any savings left. How can we pay so much money? The laborer's grievance about his caste-representative precludes an understanding of power dynamics within the panchayat, where panchayat members of various castes may vie to seek entitlements for people of their caste (Khosla, 2011). However, narratives such as the one above present further evidence of the truncated nature of empowerment experienced by the intended beneficiaries of social protection. Some villagers, for instance, reported long delays in accessing PDS cards and bureaucratic entanglements that resulted in a loss of interest in securing cards. One villager (a young, male agriculturist) suggested that he was not in favor of confronting panchayat members; there is little reason to believe that this was necessarily out of fear. We are pointing, instead, to the doxa of behavior and protocol that emanates out of the hierarchies of age,

4 A Sarpanch (Hindi language) is the head of the village-level statutory institution of local self-government called the panchayat (village government.).

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class, caste, and gender that reproduces the village society. For the poorer peasants, then, entitlements would significantly depend on their ability to unsettle this web of hierarchal, unequal relations, in their favor. The villagers' inability to command entitlements in a democracy administered through decentralized bureaucracy reflects the limits of entitlements without empowerment for historically disenfranchised communities. Every two months, a government order is issued to increase the ownership of a certain number of cards in respective villages. A meeting of all villagers is called, during which people discuss and decide the type of cards (Below Poverty Line, Antyoday, etc.) to be issued to prospective beneficiaries. For instance, in the last such round, fourteen recipients were decided upon, and this “people's verdict” was attested to by the Sarpanch; the Gram Sevak, a local government officer representing the state bureaucracy in the village; and the Talathi, a local government officer in charge of village land-record keeping. The list is submitted to the Tehsildar for cards to be issued, who elaborated, however, that since villagers would always attempt to out-shout each other during the village meetings to secure the cards, the higher-ups e the officer himself, and the three local officials mentioned previously, would decide on the allocation of new cards by themselves. Furthermore, the mere ownership of a PDS card does not guarantee access to the mandated amount of food grains at prices fixed by the government. Fig. 1 demonstrates that among the households interviewed for this research, food grains were sold to owners of BPL and Antyoday cards at high prices and in low quantity. Antyoday and BPL card holders were both receiving fewer PDS grains than is mandated by the state. BPL card holders were paying lower rates for both wheat and rice while Antyoday card holders were paying higher rates. Note that Antyoday card holders are expected to be poorer than BPL card holders because of the eligibility requirement established by the government to obtain different categories of PDS cards. As disempowered as indigenous laborers know they are in their interactions with the state, our research suggests a remarkable willingness to engage with and learn about the workings of local state power. The political society is a space where subaltern groups manipulate governmental practices in disregard of the formal legal system in order to gain access to entitlements (Witsoe, 2013: 7). However, due to prevalent landlessness and limited opportunities

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in the village to do non-farm activities, accessing government schemes might not be seen as a matter of choice nor necessarily reflective of a broader empowerment vis- a-vis local administration. Thus the creativity that we seem to be ascribing to the laborers emanates from necessity. Empowerment is further truncated because the ability of laborers to access social protection is dependent on where the laborers are embedded within the multiple structures of class, caste, and gender that pre-exist social protection. Most notably, we find little evidence that the expansion of entitlements has unsettled these existing social hierarchies. 8. Conclusion In this paper, we presented qualitative research on an entitlement program in India to argue that hitherto existing social relations and micro-politics in villages produce differentiated biopolitical outcomes. We make three overarching claims. First, entitlements need to be asserted and claimed and the ability to claim entitlements is contingent on minimally empowered position in the village society. Second, in a rural peasant society, state-led entitlement programs function within the ambit of rural moral economy, thus blurring the distinction between legal and extralegal means of accessing entitlements, such as food, in this case. Third, it is entitlement provision that often brings the state to the doorstep of the most marginalized sections of rural society (Sharma, 2011: 968), yet the state is not experienced as a monolith by such populations (Gupta, 2012). Instead, it is local micro-politics that render the state legible, and thus, accessible. We discussed some of the contradictions that biopolitics presents e if the Indian government's massive transfer entitlements program is a biopolitical technology that valorizes life, how do we explain the actions of actors within that bureaucratic machine (such as, creating obstacles to accessing ration cards by asking for bribes) that subvert the state's agenda? Biopolitics is an “internally contradictory, contested project” (Gupta, 2012: 71) and these contradictions become visible, when we generate a disaggregated view of the state. Following Birkenholtz (2009), one could identify the “sources of power” in the politics of food access and note the existence of power as diffuse and capillary in construction of the self-conducting subjectivity of the laborers. More broadly, our case study of Umarkhed presents a challenge

Fig. 1. Actual versus government-mandated pricing and quantity of PDS grains [N ¼ 17; (9 BPL & 8 Antyoday card holders)].

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to policymakers. Post-independence public policy in India has been critiqued as elitist and bolstering the deprivations that disempower ze, 2004: 1725). Our case study beseeches policymakers people (Dre to consider how state social protection programs could go beyond simply transferring food to people and more explicitly incorporate processes that would address local power hierarchies and dynamics of exclusion. Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler (2007) argue for a model of “transformative social protection” whereby social protection encompasses measures to address the structural causes of vulnerability. Such an explicit expansion of the purview of social protection may be necessary if such programs are to avoid simply replicating the highly truncated forms of empowerment observed in Umarkhed. Acknowledgements This research was supported by the Center for International Studies, Ohio University; Friends of India Endowment Trust, Athens, OH; Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai, India; and the Gopikabai Sitaram Gawande College, Umarkhed (Yavatmal district, Maharashtra), India. Versions of this paper were presented at the annual Critical Geographies Conference (2012 in Chapel Hill, NC), annual meetings of the American Association of Geographers (2013 in Los Angeles, CA and 2014 in Tampa, FL), and the Upper Midwest Nature-Society Graduate Workshop (2013 in Urbana, IL). We thank the participants for their feedback. We also thank Jesse Ribot (University of Illinois), and Haley Duschinski and Edna Wangui (both at Ohio University) for detailed feedback on drafts of this paper. Pronoy Rai would like to thank Sushila Gawande (Athens, OH), Meeta Gawande (Boulder, CO), and Yadaorao Raut, Punjaram Wankhede, Ganesh Kshirsagar, and Dipak Populwar (all with the Gawande College in Umarkhed), for providing access to the field site, and their hospitality and assistance during fieldwork in Umarkhed during Summer 2012 and Summer 2013. References Amrith, S.S., 2008. Food and welfare in India, c. 1900e1950. Comp. Stud. Soc. Hist. 50 (04), 1010e1035. World Bank, 2011. Assessing Safety Net Readiness in Response to Food Price Volatility. Social Protection Discussion Paper No. 1118. World Bank, Washington DC. Baviskar, A., Sundar, N., 2008. Democracy versus Economic Transformation? Economic and Political Weekly, pp. 87e89. Bebbington, A., Hickey, S., Mitlin, D. (Eds.), 2008. Can NGOs Make a Difference?: the Challenge of Development Alternatives. Zed Books, London. Birkenholtz, T., 2009. Groundwater governmentality: hegemony and technologies of resistance in Rajasthan's (India) groundwater governance. Geogr. J. 175 (3), 208e220. Cecchini, S., Martínez, R., 2011. Inclusive Social Protection in Latin America: a Comprehensive, Rights-based Approach (LC/G. 2488-P). ECLAC Book No. 111. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. United Nations Publication, Santiago, Chile. Sales No. E, 11. CENTAD, 2008. High Food Prices in India: Factors, Consequences and Mitigation. Centre for Trade and Development, New Delhi. Chatterjee, P., 2004. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Columbia University Press. Chatterjee, P., 2008. Democracy and economic transformation in India. Econ. Polit. Wkly. 43 (16), 53e62. Chatterjee, P., 2012. The Debate over Political Society. Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society, pp. 305e322. Corbridge, S., 2005. Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India, vol. 10. Cambridge University Press. De Larrinaga, M., Doucet, M.G., 2008. Sovereign power and the biopolitics of human security. Secur. Dialog. 39 (5), 517e537. De Neve, G., Carswell, G., 2011. NREGA and the return of identity politics in western Tamil Nadu, India. Forum Dev. Stud. 38 (2), 205e210 (Routledge). De Waal, 1997. A. Famine Crimes: Politics & the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa. Indiana University Press. Devereux, S., 1988. Entitlements, availability and famine: a revisionist view of Wollo, 1972e1974. Food Policy 13 (3), 270e282. Devereux, S., 2001. Sen's entitlement approach: critiques and counter-critiques. Oxf. Dev. Stud. 29 (3), 245e263. Devereux, S., McGregor, J.A., 2014. Transforming social protection: human wellbeing

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