Who Governs Local Access in Jharkhand? Mechanisms of Access to Government Services

Abstract

Government services fail to meet targeted objectives in contexts of political instability. The links between enabling equitable access to these services and building a democratic state have not been sufficiently explicated in the local governance and state-building literature. The Indian state of Jharkhand, formed in 2000, is one instance where little is known about local access to services: the literature reflects a lack of local democracy but rarely considers the relationship between these aspects. Therefore, this study examines the processes through which local actors access benefits from two contrastingly structured government services, using an access analysis framework. The empirical basis comprises two cases in Jharkhand’s forest villages: government service (i) in kendu leaf trade regulation and (ii) of minimum-wage work opportunities for rural households. The objective of each is to benefit poor villagers such as the indigenous Ho people inhabiting these communities. The study explains through what mechanisms access occurs and the distribution of benefits this enables across local actors, and then considers the implications for who governs access locally. It argues that privileged private actors not only use structural and relational mechanisms, such as gender, access to social networks, capital and technology, to access inequitably large benefit shares, but also to exercise institutional authority over services to enable such benefits. Through this recursive relation between access to services and local state-building, private actors partly comprise the local state. They govern access locally alongside government institutions, perpetuating inequitable access to government services and building an undemocratic local state in Jharkhand.