As LSE’s Julia Huang commences her fieldwork in Assam, she finds that social enterprise development initiatives such as Rickshaw Bank tend to ignore the relational and sociopolitical aspects of poverty

Huang, Julia

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LSE Research Online

2012-9-12Notes from the field: Social entrepreneurship and urbanlivelihoods in Assamblogs.lse.ac.uk /southasia/2012/09/12/notes-from-the-field-social-entrepreneurship-and-urban-livelihoods-in-assam/As LSE’s Julia Huang commences her fieldwork in Assam, she finds that social enterprise developmentinitiatives such as Rickshaw Bank tend to ignore the relational and sociopolitical aspects of poverty. Shah Jahan Ali’s village, Chandokaity, in India’s north-eastern state of Assam, has completely vanished. TheBrahmaputra River island on which his village was rooted for generations no longer exists, having been engulfed bya flood some years ago. The waterlogged floodplain is now so flat, the sandy soil so fine, it’s difficult to believe thatan island had ever been there. No one can even pinpoint the island’s exact location; the river shifts its path byseveral kilometres every year, eroding more of the south bank, but leaving new fertile land for the district on thenorthern shore. “That is the character of the Brahmaputra, Son of God, giving to some and taking from others,”remarked one civil administrator.Ali took his community to another char (river island), which had formed suddenly during the same flood season, andset up rudimentary shelters. Three other communities from flooded chars soon joined Ali’s group. This was six yearsago. Today, the island’s 400 families must cobble together a piecemeal survival and hope that each year’s floods willnot rise above shoulder level. Peanut and pulse cultivation provides a few months’ livelihood after the monsoon, andIndia’s flagship National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme provides another few months’ income. For the restof the year, the island’s men migrate to urban centres seeking short-term, unskilled-labour contracts in constructionand cycle-rickshaw pulling. When I arrive in Assam, the men have just returned home for a few days to celebrateEid-ul-Fitr with their families before resuming their urban lives. The holiday marks the end of the holy month ofRamadan when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. This year, they pray for peace in their hearts and calm in the river.Their prayers are not unwarranted: this year, Assam’s floods have affected all of the state’s 27 districts, displacedmillions of people like Ali, and led to the deaths of 117. The initial wave of rice, daal (lentils), and potable water to aidpeople in flood-affected areas is provided by the government. But who steps in year after year to help people rebuildand improve their lives after each bout of uncontrollable flooding?1/3In the past decade, the international development community has shifted its enthusiasm toward market-drivenapproaches to poverty alleviation. Based on the premise that a top-down approach is a major reason for the failureof conventional government development programmes, social enterprises increasingly assert themselves as ‘bestpractice’ business models to achieve economic and social goals simultaneously. Self-defined antithetically to thepaternalism of the aid industry, the inefficiency of the state, and the unscrupulousness of the capitalist market, socialenterprises attempt to address the challenges of low-income and post-disaster communities.Over 600 independent social-enterprise initiatives have emerged in the past two decades in India and have claimedto serve over 50 million vulnerable people (ranging from several hundred to several million individuals for eachenterprise). These initiatives stimulate a growing circle of investors, consultants, and research bodies andsometimes seek absorption into public sector programmes. Social enterprises employ “innovative” models thatprofess to provide livelihoods and tackle poverty by providing “solutions” to challenges in agriculture, education,finance, health, housing, and sanitation.One such social enterprise, Rickshaw Bank, seeks to address the difficulties faced by 10 million cycle-rickshawpullers in India: irregular income, high daily vehicle-rental fees to patrons who own the rickshaws, and exclusionfrom formal and public services. Rickshaw Bank aims to improve the quality of life of rickshaw pullers through theprovision of asset-based loans that enable the ownership of a redesigned rickshaw, formal self-employment withintwo years, and access to key social services. The enhanced income and dignity, Rickshaw Bank contends,empowers rickshaw pullers to improve their living conditions, send their children to school, and invest in theirfutures. In recent years, by deeply understanding the challenges facing urban labourers, Rickshaw Bank has helpedthousands of rickshaw pullers achieve ownership of a stable means of production.But it remains unable to help Ali, who spends half of the year in the town of Sibsagar working as a rickshawpuller. He pays 50 rupees each morning to the rickshaw patron (who owns and rents out 60 rickshaws) and pulls anexhausting 16-hour workday, harassed by both police and customers. At night, he collapses alongside dozens ofothers in a rented communal room costing him 300 rupees per month. Although his living and working conditionsare harsh, Ali cannot avail of the benefits of Rickshaw Bank because his life is at home with his family, on the richalluvial fields on the char in the Brahmaputra—he is not trying to become a permanent rickshaw puller.Social-enterprise development practices such as Rickshaw Bank tend to ignore the relational and sociopoliticalaspects of poverty. The managers of such enterprises often do not inquire into the reasons why people are poor, orthe conditions under which they became rickshaw pullers (or other informal labourers) in the first place. For themajority of urban, informal workers who rely on labour contracts compatible with a seasonally migrant life, there areno advantages to a long-term patronage by a social enterprise; indeed, the practice may even delink labourers likeAli from other helpful systems of brokerage they depend on.Over the next 20 months, I will investigate the established and emerging structural effects of programmes such asRickshaw Bank. I hope to learn about the experiences of the urban poor, and their rural families, who are theparticipants and non-participants of market-driven development efforts. My research focuses on three social groupsthat are likely to be differently affected by changes stimulated by Rickshaw Bank: rickshaw pullers who participate inthe social enterprise; those like Ali who are still embedded in short-term, informal labour contracts; and upwardlymobile people who were formerly rickshaw pullers, but who are now pursuing other activities. I will employ multipleethnographic approaches to capture people’s aspirations for social mobility; valuations of work and hierarchy; self,societal, and state perceptions; and household and livelihood outcomes. My research aims to combine the strengthsof qualitative and quantitative methods. The qualitative study will consist of semi-structured and structuredinterviews, participant observation of daily life and key events, life histories, and social-network mapping in a town of38,000 people. The quantitative study will include structural-equation modeling and survey to test the externalvalidity of key ethnographic causal complexes across 11 urban areas in Assam where Rickshaw Bank operates.Follow my journey through ethnographic research and the lived realities of Assam’s working poor on this blog.2/3Julia Huang is a PhD Candidate at LSE’s Department of Anthropology. Copyright © 2016 London School of Economics3/3

Notes from the field: social entrepreneurship and urban livelihoods in Assam

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/125179/2/14178194_blogs.lse.ac.uk-Notes_from_the_field_Social_entrepreneurship_and_urban_livelihoods_in_Assam.pdf

Notes from the field: social entrepreneurship and urban livelihoods in Assam

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