Shifting terms: Development discourses and moral imaginaries in Indian state service provision

Abstract

How are multiple visions of state–society relations accommodated within the daily practices of the post-liberalization Indian state? How does state service provision relate to these shifting normative framings of state duty and citizen responsibility? This article examines these questions through an ethnographic study of citizen–state encounters in rural north India. Focusing on the presentation of social services and programmes through a single village council, I trace how development discourses under the post-liberalization state oscillate between welfarist principles of distribution and neoliberal values of self-sufficiency. As the state is fashioned variously as a provider or a more distant facilitator of enterprising activity, I explore how citizens manage these shifting normative terms, negotiate the varied demands of bureaucratic claims-making, and engage with moral ideals of responsibility and care.

Introduction

Nisha ¹ pulls out her permanent marker and writes the word ‘pension’ directly onto the turquoise blue exterior wall of a house on the outskirts of Kanchori, a village in Rajasthan, India. Nisha, along with other government workers enlisted by the Gram Panchayat (village council) are completing a survey of their fellow residents, marking the walls of village houses in black ink to indicate whether its occupants are participating in any of six government programmes: a pension scheme for the elderly, a food-security programme, subsidies for the construction of houses and family toilets, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), and a programme known as Palanhar (the Caregiver Scheme), which provides support for vulnerable children. The survey is being conducted for the panchayat’s records, but many residents across Kanchori’s numerous mohallas (neighbourhoods or wards) find their own use for it, asking the government workers who appear on their doorsteps about the status of a scheme or a pending application, making appeals for aid or justice, or soberly sharing accounts of personal ordeals. Although the government workers who are conducting the survey are not experts in the protocols of the welfare bureaucracy, they offer advice when they can, or direct residents to the panchayat. As I was later told by a district-level administrative official, one favourable result of a village survey like this one is that it brings state workers out into the community and presents an attentive and accountable face of local government. Soon after the survey has concluded, the Kanchori panchayat hosts a government ‘camp’: a day-long event which assembles administrative officials and clerks who can act as scribes, and which helps facilitate access to the programmes addressed in the survey. The event is filled with residents eager to fill out applications and stake their claims to these recently promoted schemes, or submit complaints about problems accessing a pension payment or food ration.

After its brief circuit through Kanchori, a large community with nearly one thousand households, the survey has an ongoing presence. As the surveyors marked the walls of homes across the village, they left behind a public account of the claims-making histories of individual families, which allows a casual observer to track evidence of government aid and services through the winding lanes of each mohalla. The ubiquitous painted signs in yellow, black, and red that cover publicly funded buildings such as community halls or family homes (see also Kruks-Wisner, 2018: 83) similarly leave records of the state’s support and broadcast its distributive capacity, even occasionally upon projects that appear incomplete or in disrepair. While many of these signs are descriptive (stating the origins of the funds, the cost, and the date completed), some make moral injunctions in painted letters twelve inches high: Swachhta hi seva hai (sanitation is service) or Beti bachao, beti padhao (save a daughter, educate daughter). Referencing major government initiatives, these slogans offer a reminder of how material investments in public and household amenities can be intertwined with broader efforts to improve population welfare (Gupta, 2012) and influence behaviour. The terms of an idealized relationship between state and society are prominently drafted onto the walls of village homes and public facilities, helping to construct a set of reciprocal expectations for responsible citizenship on one hand and state care on the other.

In this article, I consider how multiple political and moral compacts between citizens and the state are presented and negotiated through everyday practices of local governance. While the provision of state subsidies, goods, and public utilities emphasizes the distributive capacities of the state, this vision of its political vocation remains partial and conditional within the broader context of state liberalization in contemporary India. Alternative modalities for rural development pose the state less as a provider of welfare and more as a distant facilitator in the cultivation of community and individual self-sufficiency. These varied interpretations of the place and value of state welfare, while seemingly divergent, together set the landscape for development and democratic politics. State–society relations are posed less according to a single set of contractarian terms than through a dynamic array of plural and provisional expectations that become discernible through the practice of local governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kanchori, ² I trace how these varied perspectives on social service provision under the post-liberalization state are expressed through the syncopated rhythms of programmes and events held under the auspicious of the village administration. I explore the intermittent assertions of multiple imaginaries of state care and personal responsibility, and show how these shifting paradigms may set the terms of engagement and the moral tenor for claims on state goods and services.

Welfare and the post-liberalization state

Since the early 1990s, India has seen many of the reforms associated with liberalization: austerity finance (Bear, 2015; Kar, 2017), the privatization of government jobs and services (Moodie, 2015), the creation of special economic zones (Levien, 2018), and a boom in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and corporate sponsors involved in development initiatives (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002; Kudva, 2005). Many government services have adopted the programme models and discourses associated with these private-sector development agencies, focusing on empowerment (Sharma, 2008), capacity-building, and financial inclusion. But while a standard narrative of neoliberal adjustments might anticipate a straightforward rolling back of social welfare, government spending on programmes aimed at the poorest has instead continued to grow over the past few decades (Kruks-Wisner, 2018: 59). While fiscal conservatism has curtailed social services in some sectors, government investment in programmes focused on social security, employment, infrastructure, education, micro-enterprise, and other development indicators has increased (Gooptu, 2011; Gupta, 2012: 292, Kar, 2017).

In an influential article, Partha Chatterjee has argued that the welfarist machinery of the contemporary Indian state enables the ‘continued rapid growth of corporate capital’ (2008: 53), since anti-poverty programmes in the form of ‘guaranteed employment in public works … [and] direct delivery of subsidised or free food’ (2008: 55) can be viewed as ‘direct interventions to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation’ (2008: 55). In this context, Chatterjee proposes that the dominant modality of political negotiation becomes the demand ‘for the transfer of resources’ (2008: 53) from the Indian state. As Chatterjee and others have noted, the legitimacy of the contemporary Indian state remains entangled with democratic demands for material resources and services (Chatterjee, 2008; Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan, 2011). Government agencies and individual politicians alike continue to be evaluated according to their capacity to provide and to produce the material transformations of development, even while trends of liberalization reduce some public sector services and promote self-reliance and market integration (Gupta, 2012). These somewhat divergent demands manifest as dilemmas in everyday governance where, as Aradhana Sharma notes, there remains ‘a contradiction between the neoliberal denigration of welfare and its use by politicians, elected officials, and local administrators to garner political support’ (2008: 48).

Amid the ideological heterogeneity of post-liberalization governance in India, studies have sought to understand how citizens situate themselves vis-à-vis the state (Anjaria and Rao, 2014; Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan, 2011; Sharma, 2008). For instance, Laura Bear and Nayanika Mathur show how shifting notions of the public good in post-liberalization India produce new ‘intimate relations’ (2015: 22) as well as divergent expectations between citizens and the state. As fiscal austerity leads the state to restrict the terms of its political and ethical commitments, Bear and Mathur (2015: 28) propose that citizenship becomes characterized not by total belonging or exclusion, but ‘by forms of contractually delimited partial inclusion’. In a discussion of informal labour, Rina Agarwala (2008) shows that workers have increasingly made direct claims upon state welfare services rather than negotiating benefits with employers. She argues that demands for state recognition shape an ‘emerging social contract’ (Agarwala, 2008: 378) between labour and the state. Finally, studies of neoliberal social programmes have demonstrated how citizens’ expectations for government can inform how they participate in such interventions, in some instances transforming programme effects and reinvigorating debates about ‘the role and responsibilities of the state’ (Anjaria and Rao, 2014: 424). In Sharma’s account of a joint public-private women’s empowerment programme, for example, she finds that the ‘neoliberal governmentality’ (2008: xvii) of this hybrid intervention galvanizes political and moral calls for ‘resources as rights’ (2008: 111) from the Indian state. To apprehend how people make claims upon the post-liberalization state, it is necessary to understand how citizens navigate the shifting terms of development discourses, develop reciprocal expectations according to these variable norms, and refuse ‘to let the redistributive state fade away’ (Sharma, 2008: xxii).

In the following sections, I focus on Kanchori’s village council and local administration to trace some of the ways citizens encounter the shifting development discourses of the post-liberalization state. My discussion does not seek to account for the wide variety of ways Kanchori’s diverse residents experience state institutions and agents; it rather focuses on how the representational practices of government seek to establish terms for state–society engagement. Representations of the state, I show, are refracted through the moral and ideological lenses of multiple development discourses, which frame it variously as a distributor of welfare ³ and a facilitator of enterprising activity, and offer multiple valuations of state duty, citizen responsibility, and relations of dependency. Amid these shifting terms, citizens remain attuned to how state obligations are posed, and to when and how claims upon welfarist resources are encouraged. I argue that citizens seek to seize windows of opportunity when they emerge, both by meeting the demands of bureaucratic transactions and by emphasizing an enduring, affective relationship between themselves and the state through moral idioms of responsibility and care. Following the shifting ideals associated with state–society relations can, I suggest, contribute towards an ‘anthropology of the social contract’ (Burnyeat and Sheild Johansson, 2022) by demonstrating the effects of simultaneous moral and political paradigms in everyday resource provision. This case underscores how an attentiveness to multiple normative terms may be necessary to understand the provisional imaginaries of contemporary state–society relations. Such a perspective can illuminate how expectations for the state are formulated in situ and how they come to inform practical claims on government services.

Situating state distribution

Kanchori’s centre for local governance, the Gram Panchayat, is a particularly illustrative site for understanding how ideas about the state meet the practical business of village governance. ⁴ Material, symbolic, and discursive constructions of the state coalesce here, in the tangible resources mediated through bureaucratic processes, the promises of state benefits relayed through posters on the building’s interior walls, and the programmes presented by officials who come to the panchayat representing different government offices and institutions (Fuller and Bénéï, 2001; Sharma and Gupta, 2006). Moreover, physical encounters in the panchayat permit a discussion of a ‘state–society’ relationship that may be untenable in other contexts (Gupta, 1995; Shah, 2007), as local governance is entangled into social life (Corbridge et al., 2005) and is sometimes enacted by non-state actors who mediate and subcontract for government agencies. In routine administrative encounters and in the events that I describe below, relations of ‘state’ and ‘society’ are reinscribed within the panchayat through the aesthetics of assembly and modes of address; formalized encounters in this space call upon citizens and government agents to enact these subject positions.

The building referred to as the ‘panchayat’ consists of several offices and a larger meeting hall. It operates simultaneously as the local village council, where public gatherings and quorum meetings of elected representatives are held, and as a Common Service Centre (Atal Seva Kendra): an administrative hub where residents apply for state development schemes, services, and subsidized goods channelled through the government’s Public Distribution System. Though these political (rajneetik) and administrative (prashasnik) streams are subject to distinct hierarchies, ⁵ they are thoroughly entangled in practice, with village representatives setting the priorities for the use of public funds while negotiating within the budgetary constraints of top-down schemes and requesting approval from upper-level officials. In this joint political and bureaucratic role, the panchayat is involved in establishing household eligibility for state programmes and managing local facilities, including ‘issues of water supply, housing, roads, education, child development, health services, and the administration of poverty alleviation programs’ (Kruks-Wisner, 2018: 80). The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005 has redirected even more funding through panchayats in the form of rural construction projects and has re-centred this local political forum as a significant site for the material transformation of village infrastructure (Jenkins and Manor, 2017: 63). The panchayat therefore serves as a first port of call for most applications for services, complaints or appeals, and a site where consequential local actors such as the sarpanch (mayor), sachiv (appointed secretary), and patwari (land records officer) may be located as residents pursue claims on state services.

Securing benefits through the panchayat and higher-level offices of the rural administration is often a lengthy and complicated process, requiring detailed applications, multiple forms of identity documentation, rigorous processes of verification, and recurrent visits to multiple offices. Claims may easily be fraught with additional complications; in Kanchori, filling in forms or drafting letters of appeal often requires the help of expert intermediaries, the biometric authentication systems that mediate access to benefits can be inconsistent, and simple administrative errors or conflicting information may stall or undermine legitimate claims. ⁶ Moreover, the socio-economic designations that establish eligibility for many of the state services described in this article – Above Poverty Line (APL) or one of three Below Poverty Line (BPL) categories ⁷ – do not always reflect the material circumstances of a household and can foreclose access to necessary state programmes. But despite the prospect of bureaucratic misrecognition and the uncertain temporalities of state service provision even when a claim is successful, the promise of government support continues to be compelling and, indeed, galvanizing for many of my interlocutors in Kanchori. As events like the survey of programme uptake reveal, a broad cross-section of citizens develop aspirations for the possibilities contained within the rural administration and local government through their quotidian engagements with agents of the state and actively seek to use ‘the “system” as best they can’ (Fuller and Bénéï, 2001: 25) in pursuit of even marginal gains. Reflecting normative discourses disseminated through the welfare bureuacracy and democratic politics, residents regard the state in terms of what it can provide, even while they negotiate a pragmatic awareness of known administrative hurdles and limitations (see also Still, 2011).

Furthermore, discussions around state services frequently reveal expectations for the state’s as yet untapped capacities, which sometimes go beyond the specifications of individual programmes and the eligibility criteria that formally circumscribe access to benefits. Indeed, my interlocutors in Kanchori referenced – occasionally in what I interpreted to be idealized or deliberately exaggerated terms – the state’s broad potential to dramatically alter the village’s infrastructure and to address urgent concerns such as poverty, housing insecurity, poor sanitation, and high health care costs. One man suggested to me that government subsidies, which often cover only a portion of the costs of household latrine construction (and consequently leave many projects incomplete), are insufficient and that the government should ‘take it into their own hands’ to provide every human (haar insaan) with a toilet. By looking beyond existing policy frameworks for programme implementation, such a framing emphasizes the human dignity at stake in public service provision, as well as the moral responsibility incumbent upon state authorities to take direct action (see also Piliavsky, 2014a). In other moments, commentaries on the state focused on the distribution of services among individual households and across Kanchori’s mohallas: information which is often publicly known through the practices of enumeration and verification that surround state benefits. Residents compared their own status vis-à-vis government schemes against others in the neighbourhood, village, and surrounding countryside (see also Kruks-Wisner, 2018); one respondent asked me if I had witnessed the effects of the subsidized housing programme (the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – Gramin) in a nearby village, where he claimed every family enjoyed a new, government-funded house. Calling attention to the potentially transformative, but frequently uneven, implementation of public resources once again locates the practices of government within a set of both political and ethical logics. Assessments of state services are not contained solely within the terms of administrative procedure, but are drawn from intimate comparison, personal history, and couched in moral idioms such as parity, reciprocity, fairness, and duty.

Dwelling on the expectations that coalesce around development schemes and emerge in relation to social programmes emphasizes how the state is routinely fashioned in Kanchori as a custodian of public goods, a provider of tangible resources, and a ‘repository of people’s moral aspirations’ (Kaviraj, 2011: 46). But this vision is also conditional amid the multiplicity of approaches to rural development contained within the post-liberalization state. Expectations for state benefits are temporally and spatially situated, emerging in the context of particular events and programmes that promote a distributive approach to rural development. The contingency of this paradigm becomes particularly explicit through the proceedings of local governance, where a plurality of policy approaches and moral assumptions regarding the role of the state is revealed. In the following ethnographic scenes, I trace multiple imaginaries of state duty and personal responsibility as they are publicly staged in the panchayat’s meeting hall. Highlighting tropes of dependency and state care that are variously articulated in this space, I propose that such normative accounts reveal the shifting moral logics that are brought to bear on state service provision and can help to understand how claimants negotiate the conditionality of post-liberalization development discourse.

The state as facilitator

While panchayat governance remains closely associated with the distribution of goods and services, development initiatives more broadly tend to emphasize self-reliance and enterprising activity (Gooptu, 2013; Gupta, 2012: 31). Under state liberalization, many government development programmes have adopted the organizational features of NGOs and collaborate with private-sector partners in their endorsement of personal empowerment as a means to economic development (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002; Kudva, 2005; Sharma, 2008). According to this model, the state is refashioned not as a provider but a facilitator of work that is undertaken within communities, often through financial inclusion and market integration. It is a vision of social uplift to which many in Kanchori aspire, especially when confronted with the unpredictabilities, fiscal limitations, and bureaucratic complexities of the welfare administration. Many women in Kanchori – who are often the targets of state and NGO-led empowerment discourse – participate in private microfinance cooperatives (known as Self-Help Groups or SHGs) to access low-interest loans for a small business or to pay schools fees or rent (Moodie, 2008). The networks of support that are formalized through village cooperatives and NGO-affiliated civic associations are supported through the discretionary contributions of fellow citizens; a revised conception of community welfare resonant with the norms of what Andrea Muehlebach (2012: 18) has termed ‘ethical citizenship’. As Muehlebach argues in the context of neoliberal Italy, social ideals of care are promoted through idioms of social ‘pacts’ (2012: 44) negotiated within society and based on ‘moral duty’ (2012: 163) rather than mediated by the state. In such a paradigm, political and moral responsibility for the assurance of public goods is increasingly dispersed among individuals and community groups that are encouraged to be self-reliant and ‘enterprising’ (Gooptu, 2013: 8).

In practice, initiatives that adopt an enterprising model of personal development frequently become intertwined with more ‘distributive’ approaches. Government programmes, such as the Rajasthan state government’s Bhamashah Scheme, support women’s empowerment and financial inclusion by directing cash transfers from the state into the personal bank account of the female head of household. In Kanchori, SHGs are often used by their members as sources of information and advice about government schemes, which enable more informed claims upon state services (something which may also be an intended outcome of empowerment interventions [Gupta, 2012: 277]). Moreover, as Sharma argues, the underlying logics of state interventions can be remarkably consistent across varied initiatives, particularly as ‘welfarist assumptions about women’s putative passivity and the “feminized” (read: unproductive) nature of their work continue to underpin the current thinking about empowerment’ (2008: 33). While a discourse of empowerment values independence and self-sufficiency, it remains far more ambivalent and contingent in practice, where expectations and material investments in the state’s distributive services endure.

The complexities of these shifting moral frameworks are illustrated particularly clearly during a two-day special programme held at the panchayat. It is made up of informational sessions encouraging participation in state programmes and promoting small business opportunities. Though conducted in the panchayat’s central meeting room, the proceedings are led by visiting officials from various departments in the rural administration. The attendees are woman from Kanchori and its surrounding hamlets. They are compensated with Rs 100 per day (£1 sterling) for their time and, as the first day draws to a close, some of the women jokingly ask me if I will also get rs. 200 for coming. In the circumscribed space of the panchayat’s meeting hall and suspended in both space and time from the rigors of everyday labour and resource access, this somewhat unusual event targeted towards village women has a distinctly didactic quality. It is scattered with references to the characteristics and habits expected of conscientious citizens (such as good hygiene) and of good parents. One visiting official, a tall and well-dressed man with neatly parted hair, discusses home-based income-generating activities, such as the small-scale production of decorative and ritual items used on holidays. But late in the first day of the programme, he shifts to telling morality tales intended, perhaps, to inspire entrepreneurial spirit. One story describes two hungry but lazy friends who refuse to go to the effort of climbing a tree to retrieve juicy jamun (Indian black plums) and so merely lie on their backs underneath it with their mouths open, waiting for the fruits to fall in. Another, more anecdotal account, describes the speaker’s visit to another village where he encounters a small child whose nose is running with ghee (clarified butter, a euphemism for snot). He remarks upon this to the child’s mother, even noting that there is a fly crawling around the nose. The mother replies simply, ‘We are poor (ham to garib hai),’ an expression of resignation. Bemused, the speaker asks if she is waiting for the Chief Minister or the Prime Minister to come and clean the child’s nose. He asks the women before him, rhetorically, ‘what kind of poverty is this? … It is poverty of thought … of the mind.’

Between these anecdotes, the speaker moves swiftly from humorous observations of village life – which are often met with laughter and murmurs of understanding – to a more sober and instructive register. He laments that people spend the free time made available through advances in technology sitting in front of their televisions and then complain they have no time to dedicate to productive activity. An entire family can waste hours that way; women let their eyes linger on the TV while preparing meals and leave their rotis to burn. He asks the audience, again and again, where does the time go? Before, he explains, women used to have to go a long way to collect wood for their stoves. Now, with a gas connection, one can merely press a button to light a gas stove. So where does the time go?

Such morality tales trace the plot points of an ethic of responsibilization, whereby individuals are enjoined to be self-disciplined, enterprising, and autonomous in all areas of life (Gooptu, 2013; see also Ferguson and Gupta, 2002). A scene of dependency is presented as farce; in the speaker’s parable, it would be simple for the woman to accept responsibility (to wipe her own child’s nose) and her assumptions of inevitable government care are framed as a sign of complacency (see also Sharma, 2008: 131–2). The moral deficiencies of negligent parents are, in this framing, surpassed only by the laziness of those who acquiesce to the spasmodic benefits of circumstance – who open their mouths and wait for things to drop in. The event itself proposes a solution: responsible parenting and responsible citizenship are both attainable through enterprising practice.

The next day, after the event concludes and participants disperse for the evening, my research assistant and I accompany some of the women back to their neighbourhood for tea. I sit outside on a terrace with our host, Kalini, as she prepares her chulha: a clay, wood-burning stove. She ignites an old piece of rubber tire, which emits acrid black smoke as she works to light the small sticks piled at the base of the stove; she carries stacks of this firewood to her house herself. When Kalini has prepared the tea, we join the others inside her home and find them discussing the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, a national scheme which offers subsidized gas connections (a stove unit and gas cylinder). Particularly striking to me, in light of the speaker’s comments, is that the women here do not have gas connections – they cannot ‘press a button’ to light their stoves. Several have completed the application form for the scheme but have still not received responses after a few months. When I ask the group for their thoughts on the day’s event at the panchayat, several of the women agree that it offered some useful suggestions, though it is apparent to me that they don’t have time on top of domestic tasks and in many cases, additional salaried labour, to pursue such activities.

Particularly when viewed in the context of panchayat governance, programmes committed to self-help and ‘enterprise culture’ (Gooptu, 2013) produce evident paradoxes. While participants may engage on the discursive terms of empowerment rhetoric presented at such events, this framing is also apparently discordant both with their domestic needs and with promises of state welfare articulated by government representatives at other moments. Indeed, I contend that the potentials of state welfare cannot easily be dissociated from the panchayat’s meeting room, which, through its materiality, promises tangible benefits and services. Those who seek to make claims on the state’s distributive promises can therefore approach the panchayat in a guise that will acknowledge the terms of its welfarist commitments. It is to this other, simultaneous moral and political imaginary of state-citizen relations that I now turn.

Faayadawali baat: The promises of welfare

It is the morning of a Gram Sabha meeting in May and residents are slowly entering the meeting hall at the panchayat, in some cases making their way across the village in spite of the enervating summer heat. This public meeting is intended to be a cornerstone of Panchayati Raj local governance, presenting an opportunity for citizens to air grievances, discuss common concerns, and engage in democratic deliberation (Sanyal and Rao, 2019). Inside, the meeting hall is gender-segregated: men at the front, women in ghoonghat at the back. ⁸ A recently installed machine resembling an ATM (called the e-Mitra Plus, after Rajasthan’s e-governance initiative) stands at the front of the room, occupying a position of prominence usually reserved for government officials. The computer on its side is intended to assist with bureaucratic functions like bill paying, while a second monitor facing the meeting hall can be used for videoconferencing with remote officials; during the Gram Sabha, information about the beneficiaries helped by the government’s flagship development schemes flashes prominently across its screen in yet another reminder of the state’s distributive capacity.

For the first few hours of the meeting, the proceedings are overseen by local politicians, including the mayor and elected representatives from among the village’s eleven electoral ‘wards’. Participants debate who should be responsible for cleaning the village streets and gutters and, at one point, adjudicate an encounter between a landlord and tenant. During these discussions of village affairs, I note what seem to be expressions of frustration from people sitting around me on the floor; some women in ghoonghat shake their wrists dismissively and one makes a vexed sucking sound through her teeth. Then, after several hours of deliberation, the elected representatives cede their position at the front of the room to the bureaucratic personnel: the appointed officials responsible for administering access to state services and public programmes, including the secretary (sachiv), his clerical staff, and the managers of fair price shops (known as ration dealers). In a lull, I glance behind me and notice that more village residents have entered late, with some standing at the edges of the room holding the fabric bags often used to protect personal identity documents, presumably hoping to complete personal business at the panchayat once the official proceedings have ended.

Radha, one of the panchayat clerks, stands and begins to describe the eligibility criteria for a government insurance scheme for farmers. Near me, two men who have been sitting in the meeting for several hours comment on the announcement, musing aloud that these are very good things (bahut acchi baat) – things to do with benefits (faayadawali baat). As Radha continues, going on to a description of state benefits for agriculture, including government-funded pipelines and water tanks, she laments that such services so often go unclaimed. The ISI brand (Indian Standards Institution) products provided by the government are good quality, she notes, but no one seems to want them. She is likely referring to a scepticism towards government-issued goods, including food rations and generic medication. One of the ironies of state resource provision is that the goods sought from state institutions are often perceived to be of inferior quality to counterparts found in the market. Radha explains that one scheme offers a significant subsidy on the plastic sheeting used to cover crops: farmers pay Rs 2000 up front and will receive a reimbursement of Rs 1000 directly into their bank accounts. Radha says that everyone will need this sheeting when the rains come and should plan ahead by making their applications now. She is constantly available at her office for prospective claimants, even writing her contact information on the blackboard outside anytime she goes out.

Perhaps the anticipation of a long and arduous application process or a scepticism towards government goods accounts for why some state services remain unclaimed. But in the latter half of the Gram Sabha meeting, when directly encountering the promises of the state in its distributive guise, attendees seem interested in faayadawalli baat and are quick to follow up on the prospect of various state services. Radha fields queries from interested applicants regarding other agricultural schemes and, when she sits back down, village residents raise further questions about a range of other government services. One woman states before the room that she is not receiving subsidized wheat from the fair price shop. This problem is shared by many village residents following recent measures to limit access to the subsidized goods in the Public Distribution System; the recent camp at the panchayat was filled with citizens submitting complaints testifying that they no longer received their usual rations. One of the village ration dealers instructs her to fill in the designated complaint form. But another woman, Renu, speaks up to suggest that the amounts allocated through the distribution system are not sufficient to meet the needs of large families, who may only receive 5 kg of grain for two people. ⁹ She proclaims that the panchayat is like a mother and father (panchayat maa-i-baap), a phrase sometimes used to refer to agents of government or the state itself (Bear and Mathur, 2015; Sharma, 2008) and which can also be associated with royalty and patron deities (Piliavsky 2014b: 22–3). As studies have shown, this parental idiom evokes norms of ethical obligation and is contrasted specifically against temporary and non-binding contractual arrangements (Bear and Mathur, 2015: 24). Sharma, for instance, notes that the phrase references ‘a different time and moral universe where just rulers, like good parents, were ethically bound to look after their wards’ (2008: 111). Invoking intimate kinship terms – not uncommon in bureaucratic encounters (see also Ruud, 2000) – emphasizes the affective and ethical ties that inflect state–society relations and situates them within a wider social and moral world (Osella and Osella, 2001).

The events of the Gram Sabha meeting, though in some moments marked by frustration and fatigue, illuminates multiple political and moral aspirations. The meeting is defined by a discernible shift in the middle of the day, as debates over village affairs give way to discussions of state benefits – faayadawali baat – and residents seize the opportunity to further their pursuit of tangible goods and services before assembled bureaucratic personnel, elected representatives, and other residents. Through these public proceedings, residents make claims on state services by ‘mixing codes’ (Sharma, 2008: 111): seeking to satisfy the precise terms of bureaucratic transactions while also referencing a set of enduring ethical commitments. The invocation of the maa-i-baap idiom at the Gram Sabha meeting notably inverts the critical sketch of personal dependency and government oversight offered by the visiting speaker in this same room just several months before by emphasizing instead the state’s responsibilities as a caregiver. Importantly, this vision of the state’s moral and political vocation to provide is not articulated by citizens alone; the panchayat officers charged with the distribution of government goods and services often offer a largely complementary vision of citizen–state relations in their promotions of state programmes. In fact, citizens who are not proactive or demanding enough in their pursuit of schemes and subsidies risk forgoing the many benefits accessible through the welfare bureaucracy. During the course of the Gram Sabha, good citizenship is characterized by the responsible uptake of existing state services. It is a moral injunction that participants at the meeting are only too happy to heed as they seek to leverage the proceedings towards incremental gains in claiming the benefits promised by the state.

Conclusion

State service provision is an ethical as well as political terrain that can illuminate the moral terms through which state–society relations are imagined. The presentation and implementation of development schemes helps to establish the moral obligations of good citizenship and personal virtue, while the distribution of state goods further produces the notion that government has an ethical vocation to provide. Though the development discourse of responsibilization frames self-reliance as an ideal, a set of enduring welfarist logics continues to endorse and even valorize participation in state programmes. Rather than operating discretely or in contradiction, these moral imaginaries of state–society relations become integrated in the aspirations of Kanchori’s residents as they seek to secure tangible outcomes amid precarious circumstances. Indeed, I have shown how notions of state care implicit in the daily practices of local governance and disseminated through the village mohallas sustain the expectations of rural citizens, who locate potentials for material transformation within the shifting development discourses of the post-liberalization state. Citizens pursue the benefits of state services by engaging with the enduring notion that development remains part of the ‘moral duty of the state’ (Sharma, 2008: xxxvi) and by situating state distribution within broader understandings of fairness and care.

My intimate focus on the panchayat in this article has emphasized how a single institution can embody the shifting and multiple norms of state duty and citizen responsibility generated through the ideological complexities and inter-agency variations of post-liberalization governance. Multiple development discourses and their attendant moral imaginaries emerge intermittently over time through the semiotic and discursive presentations of the rural administration. For an ‘anthropology of the social contract’, I suggest that this case shows how the multiple normative expectations that are produced through everyday encounters between citizens and the state may be consequential even while they are also conditional. As idealized representations of state–society relations are refracted through the value systems of varied development ideologies, they set important and actionable expectations for the state bureaucracy. The values associated with different models of development can inform how people approaching the panchayat formulate their aspirations, pose their appeals, and seek to hold the state accountable for its distributive commitments. Everyday statist representations, I suggest, work to establish the conditions of possibility for resource access by setting out the normative terms upon which claims to state services are negotiated.