Development Against Violence: Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship (PMRDF) in India

This article advances the literature on development vis-à-vis Naxal violence in India by using the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship (PMRDF) as a site of developmental meaning making. In the process, it reappraises the idea of the development state, its relation with violence, and its ways of vernacularizing itself through PMRDF. Drawing from the experience of three PMRD Fellows from West Bengal and interrogating existing scholarship on the subject, we argue that development matters in people’s lives and is a bulwark against violence, something which legitimates the development state. We also propose that far from being an arm of the security state as some critiques promote, PMRDF was an interactive space that brought the state and people to conversation and offered development actors who discovered themselves among local people rather than within bureaucracy. What is attempted here is not a broad theory which guides local developmental practices but a grounded approach that can work as a contingent model to understand conflict and development and how they relate to people’s place within the state.