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Patronage and power in rural India: a study based on interaction networks

This work has two intertwined components: first, as part of a research programme it introduces a new methodology for identifying `power-centres' in rural societies of developing countries in general and then applies that in the specific context of contemporary rural India for addressing some debates on the dynamics of power in rural India. We identify the nature of `local' rural institutions based on primary data collected by ourselves (in 2013 and 2014). We took 36 villages in the states of Maharashtra, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh - 12 in each of these states - as the sites for our observation and data collection. We quantify nature of institutions from data on the day-to-day interactions of households in the spheres of economy, society and politics. Our household survey shows that there is substantial variation in power structure across regions. We identified the presence of `local elites' in 22 villages out of 36 surveyed. We conducted a follow-up survey, called `elite survey', to get detailed information about the identified elite households. We observe that landlordism has considerably weakened, land has ceased to be the sole source of power and new power-centres have emerged. Despite these changes, caste, landownership and patron-client relation continue to be three important pillars of rural power structure.