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This chapter analyses the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA) in the state of Madhya Pradesh. The chapter reports on both quantitative (survey-based) and qualitative (interview-based) data conducted in the state. The strong movement organizations that played such a central role in the development of NREGA in Rajasthan were largely absent in Madhya Pradesh. The implications of NREGA for parties, clientelist politics, and voting behavior are also assessed. While Rajasthan experienced a change of party rule during the period studied (2008-2013), Madhya Pradesh did not – but neither this nor the variation in the strength of “movement” politics in the two states made a significant difference in the implementation of NREGA. Evidence from both states indicates that anxieties in the literature about civil society being “coopted” and losing autonomy when engaging cooperatively at times with governments are exaggerated.

This chapter discusses issues related to the joint forest-management systems in various parts of India. The concept of joint forest management emerged from conflict areas where district forest officers realized that turning over forest responsibilities to local communities was the best way to maintain both peace and forest cover. The Madhya Pradesh Forestry Project, which aims to improve the quality of forest operations by involving community participation in forest management, is discussed in detail. The community forestry project in Haryana, whereby the tribal people formed forest-protection committees funded by the Ford Foundation, was found to be more effective than those formed by the forest department in Madhya Pradesh. Thousands of villages in Orissa have formed forest-protection committees to counter waves of logging and social-forestry programs that excluded the villagers from their traditional forest domains and thus combat fuelwood scarcity and protect their watersheds for irrigation purposes.

Madhya Pradesh is in a low level equilibrium of low quality supply, high loss levels, low collection efficiency, and growing subsidy. This outcome persists despite a reform effort, but one which only consolidated bureaucratic control and introduced a tariff shock without tangible gains to the population. The state has bet on electricity supply as a growth industry, increasing capacity five-fold since 2000, but the resultant overcapacity could further limit room to manoeuvre. The electricity sector continues to be perceived as a political risk, a perception shaped by a post-reform loss by the reforming party, the India National Congress, in 2003.

This chapter analyses the electoral politics of Madhya Pradesh in the context of the outcomes of the 2009 Lok Sabha elections and 2008 assembly elections .Politics in the state of Madhya Pradesh has remained by and large confined to a two-party system with some presence of other smaller political parties. Although Madhya Pradesh has a sizeable population of ST and SC and also a large middle-caste population, other political parties like BSP and SP could not galvanise the votes in their favour in elections to make any significant change in terms of seat tally. Despite expectations of a repeat of the December 2008 assembly verdict, the Congress made major gains in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections in Madhya Pradesh due to anti-incumbency against individual sitting MPs from the BJP; support for central government; under-mobilization of voters from the BJP, resulting in low voter turnout; and absence of the BJSP and underperformance of the BSP.

This chapter shifts its gaze upwards to the state level to consider the question of state creation from the vantage point of the state capital. It looks at why politicians from the same state but based outside the region for which statehood was demanded also began to promote or give life to the idea of changing state boundaries as one response to changing forms of politics in Hindi-speaking states. In particular, the chapter demonstrates how the political mobilisation of lower and middle castes from the late 1960s onwards and the gradual challenge to upper caste dominance of state level politics helped to bring the question of state division to the centre of the political arenas of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, not just within the regions demanding statehood. In each case, a state-wide leader brought the borders of their state into political play from 1980 onwards as they tried to hold together cross-state political alliances. In order to explain when and why states might be subdivided, it is critical to understand how a degree of flexibility as to the boundaries of a state opens up at the centre of the political arena, not simply within a region seeking statehood.

Despite some of Chhattisgarh’s affinities with neighbouring Jharkhand in terms of its large adivasi population, its endowment with minerals and forests, and the nature of industrial development, the history of the statehood idea in these two regions is dissimilar. In Chhattisgarh there was no strong popular statehood movement, nor a strongly mobilised politics of indigeneity connected to the idea of a Chhattisgarh region. Indeed, the state’s creation alongside Jharkhand and Uttarakhand is regarded by many in the region as something of a mystery. Although statehood for Chhattisgarh was proposed as early as 1948, this chapter shows that it was competition in the 1990s between the two national parties vying for power in the region—Congress and the BJP—that brought the issue to the fore rather than pressure from social movements. Nevertheless, some common currents with developments in Jharkhand and Uttarakhand are identified: the emergence of more competitive politics in the context of a decline in Congress Party dominance, the influence of Mandal, contentions over the trajectory of industrial development and the potential emergence of ‘sons of the soil’ politics.

In the Gangetic plain, the area of this chapter's discussion, land extends from the Chattagram or Chittagong coast in the east to the Agra-Mathura region in the west, including a slice of the Nepalese Terai covering the sites of Lumbini and Tilaura Kot. In central India, the study-area comprises Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. This chapter discusses the interrelationship between their early historic urban centers, geographical units of the period, and trade routes which passed through them. In the course of the discussion the chapter also refers to the relevant archaeological situations of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand. This is a historical and geographical exercise based essentially on field-studies carried out since 1981 and puts forward only one understanding of the situation.

This chapter looks beyond the Harappan distribution zone and studies sites in the mountains in the north, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Deccan, and eastern India. The purpose is to build up columns of archaeological sequence and show how these relate and lead to the foundations of early historic India. The chapter starts with the complexities of the beginning of food production and emergence of village-farming communities in non-Harappan India. It also discusses Ochre Coloured Pottery and copper hoards.

Jyotiraditya Scindia, recently of the BJP, is a member of the Indian parliament’s upper house. He is the scion of Gwalior’s royal family and joined active politics with Congress party upon the untimely death of his father, a Congress politician. He has held various portfolios as a minister in the cabinets of Manmohan Singh and was widely regarded as one of the senior-most leaders of the Congress Party. Facing limits to his politics in the Congress Party politics of Madhya Pradesh, Scindia switched to the BJP in 2020.

This chapter describes the fiery ordeal of getting on board Madhya Pradesh, the state to which Arjun Singh the Union Minster of Education belonged. This is a good case study of the challenges of indirect management and of agency problem. While the MHRD was accountable to the funding agencies for efficient design and implementation of the programme in Madhya Pradesh it could not act on its own but had to depend on the State Government for developing and implementing the programme, and the State Government officials were unwilling to abide by the parameters of DPEP even though it was a predominantly centrally funded programme. The challenges were aggravated by the fact that the State Government was attempting to harness the positional power of the Union Minister of Education.

The tenth chapter challenges research which suggests that formal institutions such as cooperatives and private companies are more accountable and a less corrupt alternative to private traders in the marketing of agricultural produce at the village level. It shows that, first, these formal institutions mostly served the needs of upper-caste farmers in Malwa and were not accessible to all groups in the village. Second, to make them accessible, employees managing the new institutions were forced to work outside the formal system, that is, behave as a private village trader. And third, private village traders stubbornly persisted in the region because they fulfilled needs of villagers that formal institutions did not. This chapter argues that the benefits of marketing institutions are mediated by the social, political, and cultural relationships of the individuals who manage the marketing institutions in the village, and that ideals about corruption and accountability need to be reassessed in this light.

The book begins by introducing the reader to the story of soyabean and the choupals in Malwa, and the interesting questions raised by the author’s initial research visits to the region. The introduction then outlines how this story has been presented to the world as a yellow revolution and an information technology revolution. These revolutions are described by using the techno-managerial language of development, productivity, information empowerment, and disintermediation. Such an understanding has been criticised by social science research in India, especially in the context of the green revolution. However, much of this research has treated two fundamental concerns facing agriculture as mere residuals—the environment and technology. The remainder of the introduction describes the author’s entry to the field, the process of ethnographic research and gives a brief account of Malwa, Dhar, and Ranipura, the village under study.