Current Institutional Affiliation
Associate Professor, Geography, University of Texas / El Paso

Award Information

International Dissertation Research Fellowship 2000
Institutional Affiliation (at time of award):
Geography, University of Iowa
Linking Green and White Revolutions: Gender Analysis of Dairy Development in Western India

Although Kheda district (Gujarat) has become a highly celebrated model of cooperative dairying in India, Kheda’s ‘White Revolution’ has not been successfully replicated in other districts. This failure is especially unusual in the case of Khargone district (Madhya Pradesh) because both Khargone and Kheda have had very similar experiences with the Green Revolution, registering comparable increases in agricultural productivity. However, whereas the White Revolution preceded the Green in Kheda, exactly the opposite occurred in Khargone. In this proposal, I contend that intersections of agrarian revolutions with the gender division of labor is central to explaining Kheda’s success with dairying and Khargone’s relative failure to participate in the White Revolution. I hypothesize that, in Kheda, dairy development has succeeded due to (i) particular experiences of the Green and White Revolutions leading to availability of women’s labor, and (ii) inter-class marriage networks providing a firm basis for cooperative formation. In contrast, the shortage of women’s labor and the breakdown of inter-class social networks due to migration has led to the failure of dairy development in Khargone. To test these hypotheses, I will gather data on women’s daily work patterns (time-geographic analyses) and record personal experiences with White and Green Revolutions (oral histories). This research will significantly expand and complexify understandings of Indian agrarian development by adding to the currently sparse scholarship on gender and agrarian development, and underlining the heterogeneity of Indian agrarianism.

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