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Between deficit rains and surplus populations: The political ecology of a

climate-resilient village in South India

Article in Geoforum · January 2020

DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.01.007

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 Between Deficit Rains and Surplus Populations:
The Political Ecology of a Climate-Resilient Village in South India

Forthcoming in: Geoforum

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718520300075
This is a pre-proof version. Please view the above link for final, proofed version.

Marcus Taylor Suhas Bhasme

Associate Professor Assistant Professor
Global Development Studies Centre for Water Policy,
Queen’s University, Canada Regulation and
marcus.taylor@queensu.ca Governance
http://orcid.org/0000-0003- Tata Institute of Social
0944-601X Sciences
Mumbai, India
suhasrb12@gmail.com
http://orcid.org/0000-
0003-4102-0035

Abstract:
Projects to foster climate-resilience have become a standard feature of
agricultural and rural development strategies across the global South.
Yet what resilience means in practice is uncertain and contested. To
this end, we examine a state-led project to create a ‘climate-resilient
village’ in a drought-prone region of south India. The project involved
extensive investments in watershed development, agro-forestry and
crop varietal enhancement with the goal of creating a model from
which climate-resilient practices could diffuse outwards. We analyse
the politics behind this project and highlight its attempt to build
resilience through field-level infrastructures and practices. While some
project interventions provided generalised benefits, the failure to
explicitly address local social structures and power relations created
significant unevenness and left resources open to capture by elites. On
this basis, we question the narrowness of resilience perspectives as a
guide to adaptation planning. For many smallholders, a meaningful
notion of ‘resilience’ would entail buffering exposure not just to
climatic stresses but also to local power relations and market forces,
yet these dynamics were silenced in official project discourse.

Keywords:
Resilience – Climate Change – Climate-smart Agriculture – Political Ecology – India
 Between Deficit Rains and Surplus Populations:
The Political Ecology of a Climate-Resilient Village in South India

Resilience stands as a cornerstone upon which rural development policies and

projects are currently designed and legitimated (World Bank, 2015; FAO et al., 2017;
FAO et al., 2018). For policy makers, the value of resilience is that it provides a
conceptual glue to bind together multiple areas of concern under a single, simplified
rubric. In the rural sphere, for example, the concept underpins development
planning across an array of issues including food security, bolstering rural
livelihoods, preserving the natural resource base, safeguarding against natural
hazards and responding to climate stresses. Subsuming such diverse elements into
its singular remit, however, inevitably comes at the cost of coherence and clarity.
The more the resilience concept is put to work to incorporate and legitimise diverse
governmental objectives, the more it strains under their weight (Simon and Randalls,
2016). As a result, key questions of what resilience entails, who or what needs to
become resilient, and how such resilience should be fostered, are left ambiguous in
theory and are open to considerable contestation in practice (Brown, 2016). Equally,
strong concerns have been raised about the tendency of resilience perspectives to
silence questions of power and inequality within analyses of climate change impacts
and adaptations (Cote and Nightingale, 2012; Watts, 2014; Eriksen et al., 2015).

While such critiques of resilience at a conceptual level have multiplied, there are
fewer situated analyses of local resilience-building projects that illustrate how
projects manage the tensions between the abstract goal of fostering resilience and
their tangible interventions into complex social environments (see Forsyth, 2018;
Cavanagh et al., 2017; Mikulewicz, 2019). To contribute to this literature, the
present paper examines a major climate change adaptation initiative known as
National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA) established by the
Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in 2011. This programme sought to
establish approximately 150 ‘climate-resilient villages’ across India’s diverse agro-
climatic zones as demonstration sites for advanced agricultural practices and
technologies. In theory, the concentrated application of watershed development,
new crop technologies, livestock improvements and institutional innovations would
catalyse a process of focused learning, training and validation that, together, could
build climate-resilience. By creating models of best practice at a village level, the
project further sought to provide the foundations for scaling out successful
technologies via networks of trained agricultural extension officers as a means to
establish climate-resilience across rural India.

Using the case study of one such climate-resilient village located in semi-arid
Karnataka, we assess how climate resilience is both conceptualised and applied by
public agencies. Paying close attention to its intended and unintended impacts, our
analysis follows two main lines. First, we explore how the climate-resilient village
initiative represents an archetypal form of project-driven governmentality in which
rural development is condensed, as Tania Li puts it, to a sequence of “time bound

2
interventions with a fixed goal and budget, framed within a technical matrix which
renders some problems amenable to intervention, while leaving others out of
account” (Li, 2016: 79). In applying this lens, we emphasise how the project sought
to limit building resilience to the ordered introduction of new agricultural inputs,
practices and technologies that could mediate climate shocks and stresses. While
this created a bounded and systematic project with clearly defined goals and
sequencing, the attempt to constrain resilience to the realm of technics marginalised
questions of power and inequality within and across the target village. Such
occlusion generated a number of blindspots that limited programme effectiveness
and resulted in numerous unintended consequences.

The second line of analysis deepens the first by situating resilience more fully in the
regional political economy that shapes agricultural livelihoods. Although the project
conceptualised resilience within a narrow framework of interactions between
farmers and climatic stresses, smallholders themselves emphasised a much wider
set of dynamic processes that rendered agricultural livelihoods unstable and that
threatened their ability to reproduce their households. These included stratified
access to key productive resources, unequal commercial relationships between
farmers and traders, endemic indebtedness to informal lenders, and highly uneven
access to non-agricultural employment. Climate change was evidently a dynamic
element within this conjuncture yet smallholders pursued what might be termed
‘resilience’ not simply in the narrow confines of adopting new agricultural
techniques and practices. Rather, they sought to fashion strategic livelihood choices
that reduced the threat of being rendered surplus to an austere political economy in
which indebtedness, market volatility and social disempowerment were pressing
constraints on livelihoods. The marginalisation of these dynamics from project
design not only created policies that were unequal in their ability to address the
challenges faced by different classes of households, they also created the conditions
for a significant capture of resources within the project by local elites.

Resilience-Building within Rural Development Planning

The rise of resilience as the core rubric of development planning has been rapid and
pervasive. The term slowly emerged within international institutions during the
early 2000s before swiftly becoming a dominant means of conceptualising and
legitimating development interventions over the ensuing decade (Felli, 2015; Brown,
2016). Although often applied inconsistently, contemporary usage builds from the
analytical framework proposed by American ecologist C.S. Holling (1973) wherein
resilience is the degree to which a system can respond to externally generated stress
while retaining its essential form and functions. Resilient systems are therefore
those that can absorb external shocks and stresses without losing their fundamental
structure, identity and functions, or by quickly resuming them following a period of
disturbance (Folke, 2006; Miller et al., 2010). Given that contemporary climatic
change is typically represented in terms of a series of external shocks and stresses
that impact upon social and ecological systems, it is evident why the resilience
concept has had such wide resonance within both academic and policy circles. This

3
utility was strengthened by the way in which policymakers found the underlying
idea of a system that animates the original conceptualisation to be easily
substitutable with a surrogate term of convenience, such as households, regions,
countries, cities or – in the present case – villages.

The resulting representative schema of rural villages threatened by climatic impacts

has proved a simplistic yet powerful narrative on which to orientate governmental
policy. It creates, in Timothy Mitchell’s terms, a new object of development – ‘the
resilient village’ – that can be fortified through interventions to promote greater
scientific management of resources alongside technologies to overcome the
challenges posed by an increasingly capricious nature (Mitchell, 2002). On this basis,
the objective of building climate-resilience at a village level has emerged as an
important conduit for governmental energies across rural development agencies.
Leading international agricultural organisations from CGIAR to ICRISAT now
promote variations of the ‘climate-resilient village’ framework predicated upon the
concentrated introduction of new inputs, infrastructures, practices and technologies.
ICRISAT, for example, projects to build ‘climate-smart villages’ across the semi-arid
tropics focused on watershed management, redesigning crop-livestock systems, and
the promotion of digital agro-technologies, meteorological information sharing, and
climate modelling for crop systems (ICRISAT, 2016). Likewise, CGIAR maintains the
importance of working at a village-scale and has advanced its own eight step
process for the creation of climate-smart villages across Asia, Africa and Latin
America (Srisath et al., 2017; Aggarwal and et. al., 2018).

What is meant by resilience in these contexts, however, is often left opaque. In their
discussion of building climate-resilient villages, Rao et al. suggest that the latter
involves integration of adaptation, mitigation, and other practices which “increases
the capacity of the system to respond to various climate-related disturbances by
resisting or tolerating the damage and recovering quickly” (Rao et al., 2016). This
notion of systems under threat from climatic shifts, however, is inadequate to
describe the nature and complexity of rural social relations. Indian villages are not
‘systems’ in the sense of a bounded set of interactions between functionally related
parts operating within a dynamic equilibrium. Rather they are complex political
economic entities that are typically stratified by enduring social hierarchies in
which households hold vastly different levels of assets, social networks and cultural
capital (Harriss, 2006; Pattenden, 2016). These differences shape how households
interact with each other – including renting land, seeking labouring opportunities,
borrowing money, acquiring political influence – and also their position within the
wider agrarian economy in which they are unequally integrated into regional
markets for inputs, outputs and labouring opportunities. As a result, when climatic
variability impacts upon a village, it does not do so equally. As emphasised by the
political ecology literature on vulnerability, social distinctions in terms of class,
caste, gender and age greatly strongly shape who is more exposed to adverse
impacts while others are more secure (Wisner et al., 2004).

4
More dynamically, however, by changing the composition and value of household
assets and altering livelihood strategies, climatic stresses also shift the nature of
social relationships across a village impacting the distribution risks and rewards.
The increased incidence of drought – for example – can have the perverse effect of
empowering those village members who have control over reliable water sources or
hold the ability to extend credit or employment to neighbours in need.
Simultaneously, it increases the dependency of those who rely on the assets and
opportunities held by others (Mosse, 2010; Onta and Resurreccion, 2011). On this
basis, climate change can empower some – opening new strategies for consolidating
wealth and influence – while pushing others into greater levels of dependency and
vulnerability (Taylor, 2013a). Climatic change therefore does not simply impact
some groups more than others. It reconfigures relationships between social groups
in ways that reshape who might be considered ‘resilient’ at whose potential expense.

What is particularly worrying within the rise of planning approaches basing

themselves on the concept of resilience, is that this rubric gives almost no basis for
conceptualising – still less addressing – these kinds of power relations (Cote and
Nightingale, 2012; Watts, 2014; Taylor, 2015; Mikulewicz, 2019; Taylor and
Mikulewicz, 2019; Ruszczyk, 2019). This is compounded because climate change
adaptation projects also change inter-village relationships through the introduction
of new resources, forms of knowledge and networks. While such projects invariably
operate with the goal of improving local adaptive capacities, if they do not closely
consider how such interventions alter asset ownership, livelihood opportunities,
resource flows, political influence and local social networks, they can inadvertently
serve to intensify these inequalities (Eriksen et al., 2018). The following case study
shows in a concrete fashion precisely why resilience approaches that leave such
considerations implicit have multiple unintended and often troubling impacts in
practice.

Making Climate-resilient Villages in India

The National Initiative on Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA) launched by the

Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in 2010 was one the first and most
ambitious initiatives of this type.i At the time, its implementers claimed that the
programme represented the single largest climate change outreach to farmers
anywhere in the world (Venkateswarlu et al., 2012: 8). Its primary rationale was
that rural India was uniquely vulnerable to climate change owing to the dependence
of a large section of the population on agricultural livelihoods, excessive pressure on
natural resources, and relatively weak coping mechanisms. Given the projected
negative impacts upon yields – potentially a reduction of between 4.5 and 9 percent
depending on the magnitude and distribution of warming (Rao et al., 2016) –
climate change was projected as a significant threat to rural incomes, food security
and national GDP.

In response, the ICAR programme sought to provide site-specific agricultural

technologies in 100 districts that it identified as specifically vulnerable to climate

5
variability. Dividing interventions into four areas – natural resource management,
crop production, livestock and fisheries, and institutional innovations – the
programme sought to identify key climate vulnerabilities in agricultural production
within each domain (Venkateswarlu et al., 2012). Once recognised, project
managers were then expected to remedy those problems through the suitable
choice and application of agronomic knowledge, inputs and technologies drawn
from within the national research and extension system. On this basis, the 151
chosen model villages would serve simultaneously as testing grounds for new
technologies, sites of learning for both farmers and extension agents, and as focal-
point demonstration sites for state-of-the-art climate resilient practices that could
then be diffused horizontally across districts by agricultural extension departments.

At a practical level, each village level intervention would be sequenced over a five
year period in which financial resources and agronomic expertise would be made
available to saturate the location in suitable climate-resilient technologies and
therein render it ‘climate-proof’ (Rao et al., 2016). The specific technologies and
practices implemented under each category were expected to vary from village to
village according to local socio-economic and agro-ecological characteristics that
would be identified by participatory risk-assessment exercises involving local
farmers (Venkateswarlu et al., 2012: 8). Although the programme spoke to the need
to combine modern science with traditional knowledge, interventions tended to be
externally driven with a strong emphasis on expert knowledge that could be refined
by local adaptations. As a result, few of the techniques highlighted within the
programme literature were new. Rather, the primary interventions from rainwater
harvesting to improved crop varieties are staples of Indian rural development
practices operating for decades under the rubrics of agricultural modernisation and
poverty alleviation (Mosse, 2005; Chhotray, 2011).ii

Where the ICAR programme did diverge from existing programming was in its
identification of the village as the focal unit of intervention. As a guiding policy
document noted, the underlying strategy was to implement “resilient practices at a
scale to cover the entire village in a saturation mode”, therein avoiding the
fragmentation of extension efforts associated with previous programmes (Rao et al.,
2016: 28). Once established as a paradigm of resilience, the model village could then
serve as a nodal point within a process by which climate-resilient agricultural
techniques could be learned by both farmers and extension agents and subsequently
diffused at a regional scale. In this manner, the programme sought to address the
challenging problem of scaling-out climate-resilient agricultural interventions that
has weakened similar initiatives elsewhere (Westermann et al., 2018).

To better understand the underlying rationalities of the climate-resilient village

programme, it is useful to situate the initiative in terms of what Tania Li describes as
a project mode of governmentality in which programmes seek to create a clearly
delineated objective in which cause and effect can be easily demarcated and
interventions with predictable results planned and effected (Li, 2016; Li, 2007). In
the ICAR programme, this tendency is notable in three areas. First, the programme

6
established its rationale through the identification of specific deficiencies – a lack of
suitable technologies and practices within smallholder agriculture to withstand
climatic shocks and stresses – that needed to be remedied through the application of
outside expertise. Issues that fell outside this remit – such as the social contexts in
which agriculture is performed – were simply ignored, no matter their relevance to
agricultural production and livelihood outcomes. Second, the project then sought to
render climate-resilience as a technical process, one in which a clearly defined and
bounded problem – the lack of climate-resilience – could be resolved through the
provision of new knowledge, practices and technologies. The ICAR approach, in
short, fits what T. Jayaraman (2017: 286) has critiqued as a form of policymaking in
which climate change adaptation is reduced exclusively to a matter of new
technologies for agriculture. Thirdly, the project was conscious of the need to
project success and ensured that its forms of intervention were easily legible to
higher levels of administration that required precise itemisation of project outcomes
along clearly defined metrics and timelines.

Cast within this technical form, the climate-resilient village programme opened up
three key fault lines. First, in constructing ‘the village’ as the appropriate unit of
analysis for climate-resilience, it silenced questions of power within and between
households that were vital to understanding how the project would shape
livelihoods (see Robbins, 2000). Far from a homogenous farming population,
village-level interventions engaged with an uneven social terrain wherein different
households hold sharply differing access to key productive inputs such as land,
water, labour and credit. By assuming that interventions work seamlessly across
such socio-economic divides, the project took no stock of how its interventions
would become entangled with the evolving political economy of its target villages in
ways that complicated its core goals. On the contrary, by seeking to redesign
infrastructures, alter landscapes and re-orientate farming practices, such
interventions inevitably reshaped rural power relations and village hierarchies
leading to complex outcomes beyond those legislated for in project design.

Second, by restricting climate-resilience as an issue of designing appropriate

farming technologies, there was no consideration given to how the project
functioned within a regional political economy of agriculture in which households
operated in conditions of significant indebtedness, unequal trading relationships,
and the stratified availability of non-agricultural livelihood opportunities (see Hellin
and Fisher, 2018: for similar concerns in a different geographical context). In the
Indian setting, this is particularly important because climate change forms just one
facet of what has been described as a generalised ‘agrarian crisis’ manifested first
and foremost as a reproduction squeeze on smallholder households (Harriss-White,
2008; Reddy and Mishra, 2010; Swaminathan and Baksi, 2017). Trapped between
agricultural production that is lowly remunerative and irregular employment in
non-agricultural labour markets, smallholders considered meteorological stresses
to be simply one determinant of livelihood sustainability. Hence, while the project
saw climate change as posing a set of technical questions at the level of the field, the
target population viewed climate shocks and stresses as an inseparable moment of a

7
broader political ecology of agricultural production and livelihood dynamics. This
led to diverging ideas of what ‘resilient’ livelihoods entailed.

Third, designating the village as a model of best-practice generated a series of

internal pressures within the programme. Once granted model status, villages
become not only sites for technical interventions but also politicised showcases for
wider audiences (Flachs, 2017; Stone, 2018). This leads to two key tensions: on the
one hand, to maintain a model project requires concentrated financing, resources
and expertise from external agencies that creates an environment that is tangibly
distinct from neighbouring villages. While scaling-out is a buzzword that animates
the programme, other villages are ultimately intended to replicate outcomes
without the resources that made the former possible in the first place. On the other
hand, political pressures upon implementers to represent the project as a success
easily leads to the production of simplified descriptions of outcomes that lack
reflection over who gets to define and corroborate what success means and over
what timescale (Sumberg et al., 2012; Svarstad and Benjaminsen, 2017). The annual
reporting documents for NICRA, for example, are composed of short, bounded
anecdotes of successful technical achievements from across India with
accompanying photos of the implementing farmers (NICRA, 2016; NICRA, 2017;
Srinivasa Rao et al., 2016). These snapshots of success are offered without any
contextual detail or critical reflexivity about the nature of interventions and their
intended and unintended outcomes over time.

In the sections that follow, we explore these tensions in the unfolding of the climate-
resilience project implemented in the village of Nagenahalli located in a hilly and
drought-prone region of southern Karnataka. To this end, we conducted 45 semi-
structured interviews with direct cultivators – individually or in small groups –
across the village of Nagenahalli in Karnataka, which had been selected as one of the
initial models for the programme. These interviews were supplemented with nine
focused interviews with key government agencies involved in NICRA project
alongside those concerned with agricultural extension and rural development more
generally. The latter included interviews with Krishi Vigyan Kendra officials (KVK –
national public extension authorities) who implemented the project, Raita Samparka
Kendra personnel (RSK – Karnataka public extension authorities) who provided
supplementary extension support in the region, and officials from the regional
Forestry Department, Groundwater Department, Minor Irrigation Department, and
the general Taluk administrative office.

The majority of our interviews were with smallholder farmers who cultivated land
on both sides of Nagenahalli and in neighbouring villages surrounding the village.
We sampled farmers that provided a cross-section of landholdings and caste status
alongside three spatially important distinctions: 1) farmers from the east side of the
village where the greatest investment in watershed infrastructure development had
occurred; 2) those on the west side of the village, who were included in the
programme aspects directed towards constructing farm ponds and changing
cropping practices but not directly part of the major watershed redevelopment; and

8
(3) those from just outside the village boundaries who faced similar challenges to
farmers in Nagenahalli yet had not been included in the official NICRA project (see
tables 1 and 2). In terms of the gender division, five of the Nagenahalli farmers were
female, with the rest male. Four were from Scheduled Castes, with the remainder
being Gowdas and therein categorised as an Other Backward Castes in the terms of
the national census.

<< Insert Table 1: Interviews Conducted with Farmers >>

<< Insert Table 2: Sources of Irrigation Among Interviewed Farmers >>

Our interviews were semi-structured in nature and designed to address multiple

aspects of agricultural practice, livelihood strategy and relationship to the CRV
project. Typically they were with individual farmers, although occasionally more
farmers joined in an interview initially out of curiosity, leading to a small-group
interview emerging organically. Using these farmer interviews in combination with
those conducted with officials, we sought to gain insight into both the socio-political
dynamics of the CRV project alongside the primary factors that farmers themselves
identified as shaping their relative livelihood security.

Nagenahalli – Making A Climate-Resilient Village

The choice of Nagenahalli as the site for the NICRA programme in part rested on its
ability to serve as an archetype of villages in the district. Set within a north-south
valley with forested hills on both western and eastern sides, it has a population of
about 950 people with around 190 hectares of cultivated area. As across Karnataka,
the standard operational size of land holdings has become increasingly small over
the past three decades owing to households subdividing land among male children
(Ramakumar, 2017). Seventy five percent of farms across Tumkur district as a
whole are now small or marginal, with the average holding in this category less than
one hectare. Contrarily, the top eight percent of landowners hold almost a third of
cultivated land, therein demonstrating persistently strong inequalities in land
ownership (see table 2). Landholding patterns in Nagenahalli are reflective of these
district averages, with a small number of medium farmers – often part of the same
families – alongside a majority of small and marginal farmers (Ramesh et al., 2015).
Members of scheduled tribes (ST) make up around 20 percent of the village and
typically have holdings that place them in the marginal and small farming categories.

<< Insert Table 3: Landholding sizes in Tumkur District >>

The cropping pattern in Nagenahalli is common to those across Karnataka’s dry

central hilly zone. Finger millet, lentils, maize and groundnut are cultivated within
rainfed agriculture, with households typically diverting a portion of this production
towards subsistence needs while marketing the remainder. Under rainfed
conditions, this kind of agricultural production earns minimal returns at best. As
Kammardi et al. (2017) note in their analysis of the cultivation of major crops in

9
Karnataka, when total costs including household labour are included, smallholder
agriculture tends to be profoundly unremunerative and deeply reliant on the self-
exploitation of household labour. More palatable returns are potentially available
through the production of cash crops such as rice, tomatoes, coriander and chillis.
The production of flowers for religious garlands is a more recent entry into the
repertoire of commercially orientated farmers, while land on forested slopes may be
used to cultivate mango, coconut, areca and amla. The ability to cultivate cash crops,
however, typically requires secure irrigation facilities to provide consistent water
and also involves a high degree of risk owing to the higher cost of inputs alongside
turbulent market prices (Sarkar, 2017).

In this context, climate variability is a significant challenge to smallholder

livelihoods. With an average annual rainfall of less than 700mm – most of which falls
in the monsoon periods spanning May to October – the region is prone to regular
droughts whose incidence has increased in recent decades (Balachandra, 2017).
Analysis done within the climate-resilience project showed that the number of rainy
days had decreased from around 56 in the 1980s to 49 in the 2000s. At the same
time, the incidence of dry spells during the rainy season had increased significantly,
including ones that were over 20 days in length. Conversely, incidences of intense
rainfall – which can be damaging to crops and cause localised flooding – had also
increased (Naik, 2012).

Given small landholdings, poor terms of trade for agricultural produce, and
pronounced climatic variability, cultivators with small and marginal landholdings
repeatedly described agriculture as an intensely risky pursuit that delivered
insufficient returns to form the sole basis of a livelihood strategy. As a result, most
households out of necessity diversify income generation (Bakshi and Das, 2017;
Kattumuri et al., 2017). Alongside labouring in the fields of others – a task strongly
stratified upon gendered lines wherein the drudgery tasks of weeding, transplanting
and harvesting are heavily feminised – most households invest in livestock to
varying degrees. On this basis, the milk industry has expanded greatly within the
village over the past decade, with many households owning jersey cows that can
deliver small but consistent income every five days although these non-native
breeds are susceptible to heat stress and disease (Department of Animal Husbandry
and Veterinary Services, 2016). Raising goats is seen as a more reliable yet less
remunerative element of livelihood diversification. Goats take three years to reach
maturity, yet they are valued for their hardiness, ability to forage on scrubland, and
the potential to sell them at short notice if immediate liquidity is required.

Conversely, other natural resource based livelihood options in the village have
decreased markedly over the past decades. The dry deciduous forests that bound
the village lands to the east and west are now rarely used for grazing and collection
of food, medicines, firewood and rattan for basket weaving. In part this is because
there is a stronger policing of the hills as conservation areas wherein forestry
officers actively build fences and deep trenches aimed to keep villagers and
livestock out (Prakash et al., 2006).

10
Given these constraints, household livelihood strategies are increasingly reliant
upon employment opportunities outside of agriculture both within the district and
in the city of Tumkuru located 20 kilometres away. Notably, the growth of a textile
industry over the past decade on the outskirts of Tumkuru has provided new
livelihood possibilities for rural households with younger female members who fit
the strict recruiting profiles of the sector. Other women work as agricultural
labourers, domestic servants, or as small retailers within the service sector. For
rural men, the construction sector remains a prototypical source of employment
outside of agriculture along with service sector occupations such as working as
drivers or in petty commerce. Employment of this nature, however, is normally
informal, insecure, temporary and often seasonal (Pattenden, 2016). It is strongly
segmented according to age, gender and education, making it hard for villagers to
find consistent and secure employment. As a result, most rural households mediate
the risks of underemployment by retaining one foot in agriculture despite its low
remuneration. This task often falls to older household members – male or female –
who consistently work the fields while younger members seek paid employment
and help with agriculture tasks at peak times.

Building Climate-Resilience 1: Watershed Development

This context made the village a strong potential location for the model climate-
resilient village project as it is broadly characteristic of village conditions across the
district. The centrepiece of building climate-resilient in Nagenahalli was
undoubtedly a substantial investment in watershed development. Given the village
location positioned between two extensive hillside watersheds, project designers
envisaged a significant opportunity to harvest rainwater that might otherwise flow
directly off the hills and out of the valley. This desire to better control water and
avoid wastage is a central element of most climate-resilient agriculture programmes
and expresses a strong continuity with longstanding programmes of agricultural
modernisation in India on-going since the colonial period (Gidwani, 2008; Chhotray,
2011). On the east side of the village, engineers sought ways to refurbish and
expand runoff infrastructures on in ways that slowed and trapped water either for
immediate usage or to recharge groundwater aquifers. The most intensive
operations involved the creation of new concrete channels and check dams to slow
and collect water running off the hillsides. Simultaneously, existing water structures
were renovated where they had become filled with silt or where channels had
collapsed and some contouring or levelling of land took place to restrict runoff at a
field level. Most extensively, farmers were then invited to request the use of a
mechanical digger to construct individual farm ponds as rainwater harvesting
structures. Together, these activities resulted in the creation of 5 new check dams,
72 farm ponds, 13 percolation ponds and 4 concrete-lined storage structures.
Additionally, a further 15 existing farm ponds, 8 check dams, and 2 community
tanks were improved while established infrastructures for water catchment were
de-silted and widened (Ramesh et al., 2015; Rao et al., 2016).

11
Through this infrastructure, project implementers sought to saturate the village
with harvesting structures sufficient to meet the water needs of every farmer. As a
description of the project highlighted, if all the newly created and renovated
structures worked at full capacity this might double the water harvesting potential
to 196,560m3 (Ramesh et al., 2015). Such an accomplishment would was projected
to help liberate the village from the fickleness of rain patterns under a changing
climate and to provide the security necessary to transfer production towards higher
value crops such as tomatoes, chillies, flowers and other market vegetables. Given
the extent of completed infrastructural improvements, the project was able to
project a significant success story:

Over a period of time water storage capacity increased significantly,

covering more area under irrigation and enhancing the cropping pattern,
intensity and productivity of several crops. Both per capita cultivable land
and yield increased but per capita availability of produce increased
drastically in the village. Water resource management improved the
socioeconomic status of D. Nagenahalli people (Ramesh et al., 2015: 789).

While many of these outcomes were apparent at the time of our research, the
overall impacts demonstrated greater unevenness and complexity than
acknowledged within the project literature. This is because, by rendering the project
as a strictly technical process of infrastructural change, it shunned any attempt to
grapple with the social dimensions of irrigation (Baviskar, 2007). Although project
managers acknowledged that the benefits from the new structures could be
maximized through some form of water sharing, there was no mechanism within the
project to engage with the social dynamics of water access (see Gupta, 2011: for a
comparable study). Specifically, while rainwater harvesting structures were built
through public subsidization, they were typically located on or between private
lands. As a result, where rainwater could be captured, it became the property of the
individual landowner to be privately used or traded. Even water in the new check
dams that lined the base of the valley required ownership of adjacent fields and
investment in suitable pumping technologies for access.

This contrast between the public creation of watershed infrastructure and the
private appropriation of the resulting water accentuated an important shift in the
power relations across semi-arid parts of south India (Gupta, 2011; Taylor, 2013b;
Baviskar, 2007; Chhotray, 2011). Whereas land ownership has typically been
recognised as a foundation of social hierarchy in rural India, under changing climatic
conditions, land is now valuable as the topographical basis on which to gain access
to water. A marked example of this was evident in the neighbouring village, where
an affluent and educated farmer had used ownership of strategically placed fields to
an build an elaborate harvesting infrastructure that channelled water into a
substantial pond among his fields. Combined with several borewells and a network
of linking irrigation pipes, this farmer was able to strategically halt water on its
downward trajectory, store it, and use it to cultivate a set of paddy fields that were
noticeably verdant upon a parched hillside suffering under a late monsoon. Beyond

12
his private cultivation, however, the control over water enabled the farmer to
engage in a new type of share-cropping contract wherein water-rich farmers are
trading water for the rights to between a fifth to a third of final output, depending on
the amount of water provided. For those who had the means to control water
through such infrastructures and technologies, new accumulative opportunities
arose that were directly exploitative of less-resourced neighbours.

To an extent, the project goal of saturating the village with harvesting structures
appeared – in a haphazard and unplanned manner – to provide a degree of equity by
offering the means to all farmers to construct farm ponds. This outcome was limited,
however, by uneven land ownership in the areas the project served. Notably, the
bulk of large-scale infrastructure such as channels and check dams was limited to a
relatively narrow stretch of suitably contoured hillside on the east side of the village.
In this zone, the synergies envisaged by the project architects were readily apparent.
Sizeable concrete infrastructures channelled water from the hillsides where ponds
and wells trapped it as gravity pulled it down the valley. Over time, groundwater
aquifers in the low valley benefited from greater seepage from these ponds and as a
result, farmers with fields on this side of the village – and particularly in the low
folds of the valley – undoubtedly gained from water catchment and improved levels
of groundwater. For the farmers in this band of fields, the transformation of the
watershed facilitated the cultivation of market-orientated crops such as tomatoes
and coriander and, at the very bottom lowest fold of the valley, farmers grew paddy
even in drought conditions using borewells that they said were remarkably
consistent.

Nevertheless, the bulk of agricultural fields lay outside of this catchment zone,
spreading out westwards under a different watershed. While more prosperous
households tended to have fields on both sides of the village – and therefore a
stronger chance of being able to access water – most marginal and small farmers
were restricted to plots on one or other side, with the majority of land holdings
falling outside the newly manufactured waterscape. Here, the possibility of
accessing groundwater was exceptionally more difficult with wells needing to be
sunk to a depth of around 1000 feet – an exceptionally costly process with a high
rate of failure. As a result, the project enhanced a process of socio-economic
differentiation along geographic and class lines. Those with suitably located
holdings most able to benefit from the watershed infrastructures now had added
security upon which to engage cash crop agriculture or to become water merchants
who could claim a portion of neighbouring crops. Such rewards could be
accentuated for households with larger landholdings and access to credit to sink
new or deeper borewells.

For smallholders outside of the heavily renovated catchment area, these synergies
did not apply. While these farmers were still able to construct of farm ponds to catch
and store rain water, such ponds tended to be isolated from the more elaborate
replenishment infrastructures created by the project and therein heavily dependent
upon direct rainfall for recharge. The potential benefits and risks of such ponds,

13
moreover, were stratified by socio-economic factors. To build a pond requires
farmers being willing to make a tradeoff with lost acreage for cropping. For farmers
with relatively more extensive holdings, this generally appeared to be a worthwhile
investment because the construction of a larger and deeper pond – some with a
surface area of 30 by 30 feet – facilitated a move into more water-intensive yet
lucrative cropping patterns including vegetables, or to engage in water sales. For
farmers with marginal or smallholdings, however, the tradeoffs involved in digging
farm ponds were more challenging. Turning cultivable land into pond space
involved sacrificing limited cropping area while the smallest ponds – measuring 10
by 10 feet – had limited depth and therefore a much smaller holding capacity.

At the same time, farm ponds worked most effectively in conjunction with a
borewell. Rather than waiting for rainwater to fill the pond, farmers with functional
borewells pumped groundwater directly into ponds and used them as above ground
storage tanks. This was undertaken to mitigate the risk of pervasive electricity cuts
that often rendered borewells useless when most needed. It also enabled farmers to
privatise a portion of the limited quantity of groundwater that existed in
underground aquifers by pre-emptively capturing it in private storage. Notably, in
Nagenahalli, all but one of the farmers with 3 or more acres utilised this
combination of borewell with pond. For small and marginal farmers, however,
accessing the credit required to drill borewells was often impossible or extremely
risky (Taylor, 2013b). Of the total farmers we interviewed across Nagenahalli and
neighbouring villages, only four of 28 farmers with less than 3 acres had borewells
and only one of these used the borewell/pump combination.

The tendency for borewell failure, moreover, was amplified outside of the zone
served by the check dams on the east side of the village. While the climate-resilience
village project sought to remedy this issue by using small-scale contouring to
increase the rate of seepage into aquifers, the results were limited and borewell
recharge remained negligible. The project’s self-declared results suggested only half
the village borewells became active post-project, with most of those concentrated in
the lowest points of the valley served by the eastern watershed development
(Ramesh et al., 2015).

The uneven results of watershed development raise strong questions about the
replicability of the model. First and foremost, the more expansive signature
watershed interventions on the east side of the village were extremely costly
requiring a sizeable project budget of around INR3,000,000 (approx. US$43,000). In
contrast, the next climate-resilient village project in the region was to operate with a
fraction of those resources at INR800,000 (approx. US$14,500) resulting in scaled
back watershed interventions focused on the more modest practices of field
contouring, refurbishment of existing structures and the creation of small farm
ponds. Other villages in the region, moreover, had no direct budget for watershed
development activities beyond the farm pond model that is presently being strongly
promoted as a ‘scalable’ output of resilience initiatives throughout semi-arid
Karnataka. Worryingly, the socio-economic differences in benefits noted above are

14
accentuated when farmers have to pay the full costs of ponds upfront. While local
RSK extension offices do offer reduced rates of between fifty to ninety percent of the
total cost depending on the scheme operating and the caste status of the applicant,
these incentives come only in the form of reimbursements for costs. The waiting
period for refunds are substantial with farmers noting that they could anticipate
anywhere from six months to two years. This meant that regardless of subsidisation,
farmers effectively needed to have access to either cash reserves or stable credit
facilities to take on the costs of installing the pond, a luxury that few smallholders
enjoyed.

Building Resilience 2: Cropping Practices

Given that the distribution of water within the watershed development side of the
project was both geographically and socially uneven, many farmers could not
transition into the higher value horticultural crops that were envisaged to help raise
household incomes. For those farmers who remained reliant primarily on rainfed
agriculture, the project encouraged the adoption of new short-duration varieties of
staple crops that had been produced through the Indian agronomic breeding system.
These short duration varieties were presented as useful tools for building climate-
resilience in rainfed agriculture owing to their quicker maturation times. While
farmers have typically used such varieties whenever the monsoon is delayed, the
project recommended a more systematic usage of such varieties as a means to
mitigate the possibility of uncertain rainfall later in the season. By planting short
duration crops even when the monsoon arrived on schedule, farmers would be
hedging against the possibility of a shorter wet season that would otherwise affect
the final stages of plant development. On this basis KVK officials recommended a
short-duration finger millet variety (ML-365) alongside varieties of groundnut, chilli
and tomato produced within the public research system. Each variety, they argued,
could mitigate climatic risks without sacrificing yields.

In many respects, these varieties were widely accepted and represented a successful
element of the project. The proscribed short duration variety of finger millet – the
local staple crop – was particularly well received by farmers. What project officials
tended to elide in their focus on the technical attributes of short duration crops,
however, was that farmers gravitated to them not simply as a means to mitigate
potential rainfall variability but because they were distributed with a major subsidy
through the local state-led RSK extension office and, within the climate-resilience
project, were accompanied with free fertiliser and pesticides. This heavily
subsidised distribution of key inputs was strategically important for small and
marginal farmers because it helped them reduce their dependence on credit at the
start of the season. With even middle-sized landowners excluded from formal bank
credit, informal debt relations prevailed for such transactions with money lenders –
often local merchants or large landowners – playing a central role in enabling
households to meet financing needs at the beginning of a season (Deshpande and
Shah, 2010). Availing such informal loans, however, typically ties borrowers into
significant economic and social obligations (Guérin, 2014). Credit is granted high

15
interest rates or – when offered by merchants – by tying the debtor into dependent
and unfavourable marketing agreements for their output (see Aga, 2018). As a result,
the rush of farmers to adopt varieties recommended by the project was not a
function of their superior technical attributes in managing drought. It occurred as a
means to reduce input costs in ways that helped mitigate farmer indebtedness and
avoid the power relationship between farmers to lenders that the latter implied. In
short, pace the formal emphasis on building resilience through technological
improvements to cropped varieties, the success of this aspect of the project lay in its
inadvertent remedial impacts upon the social relationships of credit and debt.

Alongside short duration varieties, the KVK also recommended that farmers deploy
intercropping as a route to minimize risks in crop production. Under highly variable
climatic conditions, intercropping rows of complementary crops can help ensure
returns from at least one of the varieties during years of low rainfall and to
maximize returns during the years of favourable rainfall (Rao et al., 2016). In
agroecological terms, intercropping can help utilize light and moisture more
effectively to promote plant growth while simultaneously contributing to the
maintenance or improvement of soil fertility in comparison with monocultures
(Khatri-Chhetri et al., 2016). On this basis, the project recommended that farmers
adopt various intercropping parings, particularly cultivating the staple crop of finger
millet not as a monocrop but rather interspersed with rows of red gram (lentil). A
similar combination with red gram was also recommended for groundnut and maize
cultivation.

As was readily apparent from field cropping patterns and confirmed through
interviews, this kind of intercropping was a relatively common practice used across
many smallholder fields. Despite the enthusiasm of the project to represent such
techniques as successfully introduced climate-resilient innovations, however,
intercropping was widely practiced across the district. While some cultivators in
Nagenahalli indicated that they had learned specific patterns from the project –
particularly intercropping within commercial flower production – most argued that
these were longstanding local practices, used for generations to deal with climatic
variability. Notably, some farmers used more elaborate intercrops than taught
under the NICRA project. One smallholder from a neighbouring village located
outside of the project’s remit, for example, practiced triple row intercropping in
combination with manure drawn from his stock of native cattle and a small herd of
goats. Where possible he used natural anti-pest creations from local plants rather
than purchased pesticides, rotated crops across fields to avoid nutrient depletion,
deployed diverse varieties of crops between plots, and stored fodder over the years
to hedge against bad years. The farmer claimed to have used these practices for
decades having learned them first and foremost from his parents, although he
clearly was aware of local networks promoting agroecological farming techniques
that reduced the need for purchased inputs (Khadse et al., 2018).

What was striking about this farmer was the way in which he represented many
traits that could be considered archetypes of resilience in terms of the ability to

16
avoid or adapt to adverse events, yet these were directed at a much broader set of
vulnerabilities than those identified in the resilience-building project. While his
efforts certainly sought to meditate potential climatic risks, his greater objective
was to strategically avoid being drawn into monetized chains of trade and debt that
exposed him to market forces and power relations beyond his control. In a strategy
reflective of Chayanov’s characterisation of peasant autonomy (see van der Ploeg,
2013), this farmer sought to engage market relations in a controlled manner by
selling surplus beyond subsistence needs, retaining stores of seed and fodder across
seasons, and cultivating a single field of groundnut purely to meet cash needs. His
actions, therein, were orientated as much as possible to retain a calculated distance
from market impositions. Notably, he demonstrated an unwillingness to invest in
watershed development through farm ponds or borewells, both of which would
require incurring debts and the associated relationships with powerful
moneylenders. This absence of water harvesting infrastructure undoubtedly left him
vulnerable to periods of poor rainfall. It nonetheless highlighted an aspect that the
climate-resilient village project went to great lengths to silence. Climatic variability
was a significant problem for smallholder farmers, yet it was relationships of debt
and unequal trade that they feared the most as those formed the principal levers of
rural expropriation and destitution (Deshpande and Shah, 2010).iii Notably, across
Nagenahalli, farmers spoke of seven or eight households who had lost their land
owing to chronic indebtedness and a similar pattern was confirmed in neighbouring
villages.

Building Resilience 3: Agroforestry

The third pillar of the NICRA project in Nagenahalli was agroforestry. This initiative
was unique in the way it sought to combine new forms of remunerative agriculture
with the advancement of conservation goals and biodiversity preservation. Forestry
officials throughout the region were heavily promoting such prospective win-win
scenarios. The head of Tumkur’s forestry department, for example, emphasised how
planting of timber crops such as melia dubia and sandalwood offered excellent
economic returns and could be combined with staple crops such as millet or lentils
grown under the canopy. This combination, he argued, could serve as an effective
means to reforest agricultural lands and extend tree coverage across a heavily
deforested region.

A significant constraint with such a plan, however, was that melia dubia has a ten
year timeline until it can be harvested for wood while sandalwood can take up to
twenty five years. Wary of the long timeframes involved, the NICRA project focused
instead on the establishment of intercropped orchards through the ordered planting
of fruit and nut trees between which lines of millet or lentils could be cultivated. In
particular, the project was keen to advance these techniques on marginal lands at
the edges of the village that had typically been used only for low intensity millet and
fodder production. To advance these goals, the project provided free saplings, funds
to cover plantation, technical advice on how to manage the orchards, and small
subsidies for the maintenance of tree cover.

17
Undoubtedly, this agroforestry initiative produced considerable success in both
economic and ecological terms. A significant portion of marginal lands that had
previously been suited only to grazing or partial millet cultivation were transformed
through the line planting of fruit and nut trees such as amla (Indian gooseberry),
cashew and mango. These were productively combined with millet intercropping
under the fledgling canopy for the initial five-year period during which the
commercial trees fully developed. At that stage, canopy coverage made
intercropping less feasible but this occurred at the point in which trees started to
produce fruits even in conditions of restricted water. Standing among these
orchards, it was easy to view this as a climate-resilience success story, not least
because of the potential benefits to biodiversity within intensive agroecosystems.

Regrettably, however, these benefits were not evenly distributed because there
existed strong socio-economic barriers to successful pursuit of agroforestry for
small and marginal farmers. While such farmers were aware of the potential for
strong medium and long-term returns to agroforestry, they typically lacked the
extent of landholdings to effectively plant trees at the required spacing to maximise
intercropping benefits and to reap economies of scale. At the same time, they also
felt they lacked the fiscal security to forego immediate food production for medium-
term gains by devoting land to fruit or timber crops (see Cavanagh et al. , 2017: for a
comparable study in Kenya). In contrast, farmers who did have significant
landholdings, financial resources and good contacts with extension officers were
able to accrue considerable benefits from agroforestry. As a result, the primary
agroforestry benefits were concentrated among a relatively small cadre of farmers
who had larger landholdings and the security to turn from short-term crop
production to longer-term planting cycle in which payments were tentative in early
years but particularly strong after the five-year mark.

Most notably, one specific entrepreneurial farmer dominated the agroforestry

initiative. As head of the Village Climate Risk Management Committee, this farmer
was the key liaison between the village and KVK and had strategically lobbied for
Nagenahalli to become the model village for NICRA in the years leading up to the
project. As Taylor and Bhasme (2018) note in a study of extension activities in a
neighbouring district, the presence of a trusted local intermediary is often highly
sought after by project managers as the former can help enlist the active support of
a target population and manage project tasks when extension officers are not
present. Such intermediaries, however, are often drawn from more advantaged
socio-economic classes and are well positioned to be prime beneficiaries of project
outcomes. With irrigated and rainfed holdings on either side of the village, this lead
farmer proceeded to expand his agroforestry holdings from under two acres to a full
seven acres with 1400 amla trees, 600 cashew trees, and 2000 tamarind trees
sourced primarily through the project at heavily subsidised rates. Moreover, as a
member of one of the village’s predominant households, he managed a further 21
acres of land belonging to his family, much of which had been also converted to
agroforestry. Lastly, as the biggest fruit producer in the village, the project-

18
sponsored equipment used for the processing of amla was also located under his
watch and he headed the village initiative to commercialize agroforestry outputs.

As a result, while the agroforestry initiative was undoubtedly a successful project in

agro-ecological terms, in socio-economic terms it served as an accumulation
strategy for a minority of villagers who used the project to transform themselves
from relatively well-resourced farmers into dynamic agro-capitalists. This did not
prevent agroforestry initiatives being portrayed as a demonstration of success by
project. The lead farmer mentioned above had become the face of agroforestry in
the district and his lands were used as a demonstration site for visiting national and
international NGOs, sustainability researchers, government officials, and
commercial retailers. It is unclear whether such visitors recognised how this
showcase project was embedded within the unequal social fabric of the village. To
no small extent, this capture of resources appeared to be closely correlated to the
idea of resilience-building as a technical project that could be undertaken in
separation from the consideration of socio-economic inequalities and hierarchies.
This tendency was further facilitated by the demands upon local implementing
agencies to rapidly implement the programme and demonstrate strong results
within a short timeframe. In order to speed progress, implementers took the
pragmatic yet ethically problematic step of relying upon the cooperation of village
elites with whom they had established relationships. On this basis, the project would
be better able to meet short term aims of farmers engaged despite the processes of
socio-economic differentiation it abetted.

In Conclusion: Resilience to What?

With climate-resilient village projects becoming an increasingly prominent feature

of rural development planning, it is essential to take a sanguine look at the
possibilities and challenges they raise. It is particularly important to question how
overarching conceptual frameworks guide policy implementation by foregrounding
some issues and points of intervention while marginalising others, therein shaping
the tangible unfolding of projects. In this respect, this study raises vital questions
concerning the ability of the resilience rubric to provide an adequately holistic
approach to rural development and adaptation. With its origins in ecological science,
resilience perspectives struggle to gain any conceptual purpose on the complex
social dynamics of climate change impacts and responses. The focus on building
resilience at a village-level through technical interventions skirted over how socio-
economic inequalities and imbalances of power would affect project outcomes.

On this basis, while the infusion of concentrated financial resources and agronomic
expertise in Nagenahalli undoubtedly provided important potential benefits in the
form of watershed development, new crop varieties and agroforestry initiatives, the
distribution of such benefits were stratified by socio-economic criteria left invisible
the overarching framework of the project. For those with suitable landholdings and
access to more secure credit facilities, the project opened up new avenues of
profitable accumulation as they were able to expand production into commercial

19
crops such as flowers and vegetables or into agroforestry. Other farmers –
particularly those with small and marginal holdings – saw fewer tangible benefits
and relied primarily on the short-term distribution of subsidised inputs that
accompanied the project. These were valued not primarily in terms of being better
cultivation technology, but because their subsidisation lowered overall input costs
and therein reduced the need to enter informal debt relations.

Overall, project interventions had the unintended effect of exacerbating

longstanding processes of socio-economic differentiation, helping to transform one
part of the village as a hub of commercially oriented farming and the other as a
preserve of more subsistence orientated agriculture performed by a class of
smallholders who remained squeezed between climatic variability and an austere
agrarian economy that constantly renders them surplus to its needs. This reinforces
a pivotal analytical point. While institutional strategies to build resilience often
represent the object of resilience as practices that mitigate climatic shocks and
stresses, smallholders were explicit that such meteorological challenges needed to
be situated within the broader social context that shaped their livelihood activities.
Meaningful resilience – in terms of their ability to cope with adverse events – would
necessarily entail building a degree of autonomy from volatile market relations and
lopsided debt relations. In their experience, it was the latter that provided the
greatest threat to rural livelihood security. While improved technologies and
infrastructures will of course be beneficial for some farmers, the notion that
resilient villages can be fashioned independent of prevailing political economic
contexts and social inequalities is a disconcerting element of contemporary
policymaking.

Acknowledgements:
The authors kindly acknowledge that research for this article was supported by
funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
(SSHRC). We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful
comments alongside the excellent assistance from editorial staff at Geoforum,
particularly Sarah Turner.

i The usage of ‘climate-resilient village’ within the Indian programme rather than ‘climate-smart
village’, which is a more popular nomenclature at international levels, is due to the lack of focus on
greenhouse gas mitigation that forms one of the three pillars of climate-smart agriculture.
ii Within Karnataka, for example, most of the practices identified as climate-resilient had been part of

the Bhoochetana program launched by the state government two years earlier. The latter projected
not to ‘build resilience’ but to boost farmer incomes and increase food security through science-led
interventions (Wani et al., 2012).
iii To clarify, there is no intention to romanticise this ‘resilient’ farmer who was at pains to indicate

the austere modesty of his life. Despite his strategic efforts, he emphasised that his livelihood
remained precarious and he hoped his children would, through education, gain access to very
different job markets in urban India.

20
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