Social Capital

Fisheries are an intensive sector that provide a livelihood to many people, including fisherfolk, retailers, head loaders and others. While the government has made attempts to improve the infrastructure, such as harbours and cold storage systems, there has been no investment in improving the fishers’ access to social capital. The analysis of survey data for 268 usable sampled fish retailers, 235 women and 33 men, clearly indicates substantial improvements in the profitability and business turnover when there is access to social capital. It is suggested that incorporating strategies which enhance social capital in the market institutions would restore and enhance the role of fisherwomen in the fish businesses.

A framework for the measurement of social capital at the local level applied in four forest protection committees in Midnapore district of West Bengal shows that mere establishment of institutions is not a guarantee that localised natural resources will be managed in a sustainable manner. The process of social capital formation is important. Increase in social capital of an institution is important for the achievement of its objectives in a sustainable manner.

The wide range of application and celebration of social capital is acknowledged and, yet the question of what is social capital remains unsatisfactorily answered. Despite its popularity, social capital has created an undercurrent of opposition from progressive scholars with intellectual integrity. As this article argues, they have not been more numerous and outspoken, precisely because it is very hard to generate serious debate and disagreement. Individual advancement aside - an important factor in the rise of social capital - all it reveals is much by way of intellectual bankruptcy and a failure to recognise how social capital's ready accommodation of opposition represents a highly successful form of a legitimising repressive tolerance.

Does social capital make democracy work? Democracy is by definition empowering. A logical corollary is that development should be decentralised and with social capital, democracy and development could be packaged as a model for replication. Ground reality is more complex, as the fieldwork on which this paper is based shows. It also suggests that social capital cannot be understood outside of its particular cultural, ideological and institutional contexts or indeed independently of the nature of social segmentedness, whether along caste, class or any other lines.