“When are you going to the field?” was a question frequently posed to me during my visits to the Centre for Economic and Social Studies in Hyderabad, the institute who generously had agreed to be my host institution in India. My response every time, was to the bemusement of fellow PhD students and staff members, to say that I was already in the field. My field was just a bit different from theirs where data collection not only, or even mainly, involved certain rural villages, but also trying to understand key decision-making structures and who the people actually
making the decisions were.37 ‘The field’ was indeed as much about the interactions between formal and informal socio-political structures; to understand who was part of planning and decision-making, and then trying to figure out ways of gaining enough trust to get a chance to be heard. Fieldwork included one scoping trip in October 2006 and longer periods of stay in January to May 2007, and January to May 2008.
The controversial nature of bauxite mining made interactions with the government as well as the company difficult. Even at the start, interactions with either entity were bound to be difficult since politicians and company employees in charge were always on the move and rarely close to the actual sites. Politicians would spend working days in the assembly/parliament and weekends in their constituencies. The bureaucrats could often be found at their desks but this did not make interactions all that much easier since the incredibly overloaded top officials would only be able to spare a few minutes to hear questions in a room full of waiting people. And even when they were available they would either claim ignorance (which may or may not have been true) or find an excuse not to respond to difficult questions. While significant effort was made trying to get comments from the government and the company the fieldwork tactic eventually evolved to become based on what might be best called circumspection38 of the project with direct insights mainly restricted to documents collected via right to information, and site visits where ongoing issues could be studied and people were more readily available.
One important insight which became especially marked towards the end of fieldwork was that although key policymakers live and operate in Hyderabad and Delhi, the bauxite mining issue is mainly of relevance in coastal Andhra Pradesh, and especially in Visakhapatnam city, where concerns for local tribes combine with projections of future water scarcity for the city if mining commences. Spending time looking for, but largely not being able to meet, key decision-makers in Delhi or Hyderabad thus did not make as much sense as interacting with those opposing the project based on local concerns in and around Visakhapatnam. The opposition to bauxite largely wanted to be heard in the media or any other potential source including via a PhD researcher and were generally very interested in interactions. A wide cross-section of activists, opposition party politicians and workers, journalists, retired bureaucrats and others were engaged with, and often had the ability to shed light on, at least some aspect of the project. Misinformation was however
37Once in ‘the field’ the opposite question was of course posed when over a breakfast masala dosa in S Kota a tourist from Hyderabad on her way to Araku was wondering about why this foreigner was only visiting “all these local places” rather than some of the many great sights of India.
38Circumspect is defined as ‘to examine or inspect on all sides’ in the Oxford dictionary.
also quite frequent based on rumours when more solid evidence was not available. Site visits also proved significantly easier and less controversial than could have been expected despite the ongoing land acquisition for the refinery and agitation against mining plans.
Research assistants
Most of the fieldwork and data collection activities were conducted in urban areas where everyone spoke good English, thus reducing the need to use research assistants. Even project documents were in English all the way to the sites of implementation where local officials, though vastly better educated than the villagers, still relied mainly on Telugu. The support of research assistants thus remained limited to the village studies over approximately a total of one month of fieldwork. The choice of research assistants was based on the need to be free during fieldwork to explore the different sides to the project without pre-conceived opinions of what would be encountered. Research assistants were sought via various research institutes and universities in the region and, despite the proliferation of such institutions especially in Visakhapatnam, proved surprisingly difficult to find. Possibly this was due to semester timing where exams and other projects were already ongoing and planned to finish before the onset of the monsoon just like my fieldwork. In the end I had to use three different research assistants for different parts of fieldwork in S Kota and Araku/Ananthagiri Mandals. The research assistants helped carry out the livelihoods questionnaire and conduct interviews with those immediately affected by the project as well as with other key informants such as government employees, activists and journalists. They were all excellent in their commitment, and very importantly in their humility and willingness to listen to people in the villages we visited.
An understanding of the role of activists as gatekeepers to information based on previous work in the area proved very useful during fieldwork in rural areas. Activists provided invaluable assistance when finding out where to go and getting us (myself and the research assistants) introduced to people. Were it not for the hard work going from village to village undertaken by activists prior to us arriving, the fieldwork would have been significantly harder. This said the nature of activists is to try to influence outcomes rather than to listen to what people have to say and this provided certain challenges for research. It was on a number of occasions found that follow-up interviews without the activists present represented a chance to get significantly different responses from people.
The other problem was that the activists would only take us to see people with opinions similar to theirs. This naturally created a selection problem but since part of the research was to investigate the opposition to the project it was deemed best to go along with this approach initially and take note of where those framed as “Jindal agents” supposedly supporting the company lived for later interviews. It was found that “Jindal Volunteers”, a handful of unemployed youth from the villages losing land in S Kota, had indeed been hired to provide information by the company. But on a number of occasions the so called agents were not at all related to the company and/or the government and had their own reasons for not agreeing with the said activists ranging from mere disagreements within the opposition to different views of what would constitute development in the area.