For decades, development in India followed a simple formula: build the dam, expand the factory, run the numbers, and let prosperity trickle down to everyone else. By the 1970s, it was clear the formula wasn’t working for large sections of the population. Anthropologists stepped into this gap, insisting that development couldn’t be designed in a boardroom and handed down to communities who had no say in it. This shift gave rise to what we now call development anthropology, and its most enduring contribution is the participatory approach.
Table of Contents
Why development needed a rethink
Post-war development thinking was built around economic growth as the main indicator of progress. Governments and international agencies assumed that if national income rose, benefits would eventually reach the poor too. In practice, this rarely happened. Large-scale, government-driven modernisation projects consistently failed to improve the lives of the rural poor, even as urban and already well-off populations pulled further ahead, a pattern that renewed interest in local, community-led decision making as an alternative to top-down planning.
This wasn’t just an economic failure. It was a failure to account for social structures, cultural practices, and local knowledge systems, the very things anthropologists spend their careers studying. Rural, tribal, and marginalised communities were being treated as passive recipients of aid rather than people with their own priorities, skills, and ways of organising life. Critics argued that development plans needed a human and cultural dimension, not just an economic one, and that the people meant to benefit from a project should have a role in shaping it.
Anthropologists as facilitators
Once the flaws in top-down planning were widely acknowledged, a new question emerged: how do you actually get communities and governments to work together on equal footing? This is where anthropologists found a practical role. Their training in fieldwork, language, kinship, and local custom made them uniquely equipped to sit between two very different worlds, government bureaucracy on one side and village life on the other, and translate between them.
Anthropologists working as facilitators didn’t just collect information for a report. They actively mediated discussions, explained government schemes in terms communities could relate to, and carried community concerns back to planners in a form officials could act on. This required more than academic knowledge. It required trust, patience, and a genuine understanding of why a community might resist a scheme that looked perfectly reasonable on paper.
Bridging cultural gaps in practice
A road project, an irrigation scheme, or a resettlement plan often looks straightforward to an engineer or an administrator. But it can disrupt grazing routes, sacred sites, seasonal migration patterns, or kinship-based land rights that outsiders never notice. Anthropologists were called in precisely because they could flag these issues before they became conflicts, and because communities were often more willing to speak openly with someone who had taken the time to understand their language and customs.
The grassroots, or bottom-up, approach
The core idea of participatory development is deceptively simple: plans should start at the community level and move upward, not the other way around. This is the grassroots approach, and it stood in direct contrast to how most government planning worked at the time.
Traditional planning set targets in a capital city and pushed them down through layers of administration until they reached a village, often with little room for local input. The participatory model reversed this. It involved sitting with communities, listening to what they identified as their own needs, and building plans around those priorities. Techniques associated with this shift, such as rapid rural appraisal, were specifically designed to gather first-hand input from villagers about their own environment and living conditions, rather than relying purely on data collected from a distance.
This wasn’t an easy transition for anthropologists to manage. It meant balancing the expectations of government departments, which wanted measurable outcomes and timelines, against the pace and priorities of communities, which often didn’t map neatly onto official schedules. The anthropologist’s job was to keep both sides engaged without letting either one dominate the process.
Early intervention in the Indian context
India offers one of the clearest early examples of this participatory shift, dating back to the formulation of the First Five Year Plans under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru invited the anthropologist Verrier Elwin to advise on the needs of tribal communities, particularly in the north-eastern regions that would later form the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA). Elwin had spent years living among and studying tribal groups, and Nehru drew directly on this experience when shaping tribal policy for the newly independent nation.
Elwin’s input fed directly into what became known as the Panchsheel for tribal development, a set of five guiding principles for how the state should approach tribal communities.
The five principles of Panchsheel
The Panchsheel rested on the idea that tribal communities should be allowed to develop along the lines of their own genius, rather than being pushed to assimilate into mainstream Indian society. The principles emphasised respecting tribal land and forest rights, training local people to take on administrative roles in their own areas, avoiding over-administration through excessive schemes, and judging progress by human and social outcomes rather than statistics alone.
This was a significant departure from the assimilationist thinking that had shaped colonial-era tribal policy. Instead of treating tribal culture as something to be phased out on the road to modernity, the Panchsheel treated it as something worth protecting even as material development moved forward. It set an early precedent in India for involving anthropological expertise directly in policy formulation, rather than treating anthropology as a purely academic pursuit.
The shift to practicing anthropology
Development anthropology didn’t stop at advising on tribal welfare policy. As large infrastructure projects, dams, mines, and industrial complexes, expanded across India after independence, anthropologists increasingly found themselves documenting the human cost of these projects on displaced communities. One of the earliest such studies was conducted around the Koyna Dam, where researchers surveyed the impact of displacement on affected villagers, laying groundwork for a field that would later expand across the country as large dam projects triggered displacement on an unprecedented scale.
Over time, this work moved beyond documentation into advocacy. Anthropologists studying tribal communities affected by dam construction and industrial projects began voicing concerns about inadequate rehabilitation and the loss of land, forests, and cultural continuity. This marked a meaningful shift in the anthropologist’s role, from someone employed to collect data on behalf of the government, to someone working alongside affected communities to represent their interests.
From data collection to community advocacy
The career of anthropologist L.K. Mahapatra illustrates this shift well. His research on the resettlement of tribal communities displaced by dam projects in Odisha, including his long-term engagement with the Indravati dam project, pushed the discipline to ask a pointed question: development for whom? This question captures the essence of what practicing anthropology became. It is not enough to study a community’s culture in isolation. Anthropologists working in development contexts began to see it as their responsibility to ask who actually benefits from a project, and to speak up when the answer excluded the very people bearing its costs.
This is the point at which anthropology stopped being a purely observational discipline and became a genuinely applied one. Fieldwork was no longer just about writing ethnographies for academic audiences. It became a tool for shaping fairer outcomes in real time, whether that meant negotiating better resettlement terms, flagging cultural harm before a project broke ground, or simply ensuring that a community’s voice reached the people making decisions about their future.
This trajectory, from colonial-era data collection, to Nehru-era policy advising, to grassroots facilitation, to outright advocacy, traces the maturing of development anthropology as a field. It shows how a discipline built on listening and observation gradually took on a more active role in shaping the very processes it once only studied.
What do you think? Should anthropologists working on development projects remain neutral observers, or does their training obligate them to advocate for the communities they study? And looking at India’s tribal development history, has the participatory approach actually changed outcomes on the ground, or mostly changed the language used to describe them?
References
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/participatory-development
- https://www.fao.org/4/ad424e/ad424e03.htm
- https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/india/the-minorities-nehru-didnt-forget
- https://magazines.odisha.gov.in/orissareview/2017/November/engpdf/100-110.pdf
- https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-57426-0_18
- https://scroll.in/article/996282/development-for-whom-remembering-the-concerns-that-drove-activist-anthropologist-lk-mahapatra
Leave a Reply