The Value of Poverty: Neoliberal Development at the Bottom of the Pyramid in Rural Rajasthan

Abstract

In 2023, the western Indian state of Rajasthan—home to some of India’s poorest populations—received Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funding of close to $130 million from over 1,500 different private corporations, cementing a growing trend. In tandem with billions of dollars in World Bank and Government of India funding, the flood of CSR money into the state over the past decade has animated a vast new array of anti-poverty projects which, following the development industry’s valorization of entrepreneurship and financial inclusion as market-based solutions to poverty, often promote microenterprises and microcredit to Rajasthan’s rural poor. Through ethnographic fieldwork centered on two CSR-funded, non-governmental organization (NGO)-run development projects in peri-urban villages near Ajmer and Udaipur cities, this dissertation interrogates the cultural labors through which such development projects attempt to remake rural Rajasthan as a debt-saturated enterprise society; the new definitions of poverty which are generated in the process s; and the challenges of advancing other anti-poverty visions in a landscape dominated by privately-funded development. Over four chapters that draw on fieldwork conducted primarily in 2018 and 2019, I attend to the point of interaction between developers and development beneficiaries which I term “the development encounter”—a site where the former attempt to remake the latter into entrepreneurial and credit-desiring subjects. In each chapter of this multi-sited ethnography, I interrogate how, why, and against what odds developers advance new enterprises and more credit to the already enterprising and indebted poor. I ethnographically track developers’ re-posing of the poverty problem as a lack of market-engagement rather than a lack of incomes. Further, I attend to the dissent that must be quelled for enterprises to be positioned as superior to better-paying wage labor, and for collective democratic demands for public funding to be redirected towards the individual market demand for credit. Scholars have argued that neoliberal development renders the world’s poorest populations surplus to the needs of capital. In contrast, this dissertation situates private development in rural Rajasthan within a broader attempt to reconceptualize the world’s poorest as a “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.” By demonstrating the specific mechanisms through which the “bottom billion” continue to be approached as sources of profit and enfolded into wider circuits of accumulation, this dissertation intervenes in conceptualizations of the poor as surplus populations abandoned by state and capital, and sheds light on development projects’ efforts to insert new markets into the nooks and crannies of rural society.