Social Capital

To assume that a Bahujan with higher education and some material wealth is as privileged as their forward-caste peers with generations of social capital and privilege is an oversimplification.

With the retreat of the interventionist state, development is often perceived as a product of partnership between the state and civil society with increasing emphasis on people's participation at the grass roots. Using a framework of collective action based upon social capital, this paper examines whether social capital is important for successful development outcomes at the grass roots in forest protection and watershed development. Three villages of Adilabad district in Andhra Pradesh are the focus of the study.

The precise nature of the creation of social capital and the role it plays in furthering development interventions at local levels as well as the nature of interaction between new institutions and older formalised networks need to be more clearly understood to bring on enduring development. An evolving and increasing stock of social capital forms a necessary input for sustained development. This paper draws on three developmental interventions in different parts of India to examine concepts of social capital, and its role as an index of synergy between agents located in different formal sectors.

Social capital refers to trusts, networks and norms shared by a group of actors that enable them to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives. The study of civil society and social capital allows for the study of conflict over resources or group domination. The theoretical significance of social capital is not that it will necessarily lead to societal peace and harmony, nor does its study necessarily exclude politics and political conflict. The point is to focus attention on non-material resources at the micro-level and their possible impact on the macro-level. Whether these resources, the social capital, are structured on the basis of class, caste, religious group or geographical belonging is open to empirical investigation.

A study of the new panchayats of UP provides an opportunity for understanding the role played by social capital in the functioning of democratic institutions in segmented societies. A key finding of the study in two districts of UP, Meerut and Azamgarh, is that segmentation arising out of caste/class divisions is a significant contextual variable in determining the development of trust, social capital between groups and democratic functioning.