“The constant appearance of India’s cooperative dairying program in celebratory itineraries of national and international development can be considered one of its principal distinguishing features. One prominent instance of this utilization of the program to mark the successes of rural development was the visit by Bill Clinton, then president of the United States, to the village of Nayala in the state of Rajasthan in western India on March 23, 2000, as part of an official visit to South Asia. In his meeting with members of a women’s dairy cooperative society in Nayala, Clinton marveled at their use of automated milk-testing and accounting technologies (BBC News 2000b; Joseph 2000) and offered the following parting words: ‘I grew up in a place with many dairy cows. And I know what hard work it is. And I will always treasure this. And I will put this up in the White House so that people from all over the world will know I have come here, and I can tell them the story of what you are doing. (American Presidency Project 2000)’ “
The Professional Geographer has noted that this book “has wider implications for development studies beyond the case of cooperative dairying in India. Basu’s research is critical of broad-brush studies, policies, and programs of international and national development that aim to alleviate poverty with “one-size-fits-all” perspectives and that are not sufficiently attentive to diversity within community cultures and politics or open to multifaceted approaches to sustaining livelihoods.”
Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India is an important resource for those studying geography, sociology, anthropology, rural studies, development studies, gender studies, and Asian studies (especially regional studies of India).
