Mobilizing Religion as Value Storage: Islamic Microfinance in Bangladesh as a Model for Poverty Alleviation (Part II)

By IMTFI Researcher Bridget Kustin

PART TWO: Financial Vocabularies, Accounting and Calculation 

In my first post, I introduced my IMTFI-funded research into the Islami Bank Bangladesh Limited (IBBL) and its Islamic microfinance program for the rural poor, the Rural Development Scheme (RDS). I explored the slippages between institutional (here the IBBL) versus client understandings of the ‘Islam’ of Islamic microfinance. In this posting, I continue the discussion by addressing how a financial institution might not know its client because it does not fully grasp the assumptions and possibilities contained in clients’ financial vocabularies and their accounting and calculation practices in space and time. 

Children's clothes purchased for Eid ul Fitr are displayed;
social pressures make Ramadan and Eid periods of financial insecurity (2014).

Financial Vocabularies

Money was an omnipresent topic of discussion in the small town/rural slum community of Zinukpara, although conventional economic definitions for money categories and instruments (e.g. assets, investments, debt, and income) were not necessarily applicable. Material objects, relationships, or affects usually indexed by such definitions can be mobilized differently. For example, labh means ‘profit’ as well as ‘benefit.’ Clients might discuss the labh of an investment, debt, loan, or purchase in numerical or in social, religious, or emotional terms; certain transactions could never fit neatly onto a household profit-loss statement, if such a ledger were to exist. In another basic expression of money-usage in the context of debts and expenditures, taka (money) and shudh (interest) can be ‘eaten’ (khaowa, to eat), indicating irreversible, definitive usage, for instance:

• Ex. 1, Client to RDS field officer: If you give us less money [than what we ask for], what do you expect? .... I will eat the money [khai felayun].

• Ex. 2, RDS field officer to client: So you took the money, kept it at your house, and ate it? [khi feladay].

• Ex. 3, Client to Bridget, explaining how RDS works: “We take [their] money for a year. We don’t eat their money. Of course we all make payments. It’s not good to create hardship [for the bank], that’s what everyone says.”

• Ex. 4, Client asking the RDS field officer to accept a late repayment: You have to understand. If you do business, every day cannot be the same. But we have to give the [RDS] installment from the [business] labh [profit]. You are also a human being…you have to understand: if you have a stomach, you have to give to the stomach, and we also have to give to the stomach [pet’e to diaya foribo, onera o diya foribo]. And you have to give to someone else as well. 

Here, implicating the body frames money and interest not as ‘things’ to be taken (naowa), held (rakha, haowa), or used (babohar kora, kora), but a part of more intimate, embodied and irreversible actions entwined with the basics of sustaining life. This gestures toward the condition of poverty in which money is not necessarily a neutral medium of exchange with fungible choice in its applications, but is the medium of enabling sustenance and survival. In the third example, the counterposition of ‘taking’ versus ‘eating’ RDS funds distinguishes money that once used is gone forever and cannot be recouped or repaid from money that can be repaid. In the first example, the client explains to the field officer the difficulty in receiving RDS microfinancing that is less than the desired amount: the lower sum will be eaten and not repaid, as the amount was never enough to execute the desired income-generating venture in the first place. For this client, eating the money is part pragmatism and part punitive, as the bank should not expect to receive its money back if it is unresponsive to client needs.

This is not a question of reconfiguring ‘eaten’ money into outstanding debt or write-off-as-gift. Rather, “eaten money” exists as its own category — both as a kind of necessity, and a kind of wastage. Not all money is meant to be repaid, although this determination is made by the recipient and so is pointedly asymmetrical. Eaten money can carry its own costs, such as reputation, trustworthiness, or the ability to secure funds again from the eaten funds source. A household ledger bifurcated into incomes and expenses cannot contain this third, mutable category. 

Accounting and calculation 

Women are not necessarily the primary managers of their household accounts and RDS repayment obligations. Ameena, the leader of her RDS collective, keeps track of everyone’s debts through memory, and negotiates late payments with the field officer. As a result, managing very small amounts of weekly repayment and contributions into mandatory savings accounts — from about 0.60 USD to 4 USD — requires significant labor on the part of Ameena and the field officer. 

Part of what adds time to client-field officer encounters is the inaccessibility of calculative mathematics for clients, often compounded by the scarcity of written financial records. This is despite the fact that increasingly complex financial inclusion-oriented products require calculative mathematical ability on the part of the client, in order for the client to have a clearer picture of her obligations, assets, and financial status in time. Clients rarely use the calculators available on mobile phones as they use Arabic numerals rather than Bengali numbers. During the daytime repayment meetings, children who might otherwise be able to help with sums are typically at school or working. 

Sums and counting are performed verbally and often collectively, and the cardinal and ordinal numbering of time frames (whether weeks, months, or years) are situated against other measurements of the passage of time. These include the six Bengali seasons; events on the Islamic calendar, namely, Eid ul Fitr, Eid ul Adha, Shab-e-Barat, and Ramadan; and events such as a hospital stay, marriage, or child’s birth. 

A client passbook and bank ledger, detailing RDS accounts (2013)

Positioning myself within the community in the register of ‘participant observer’ meant engaging in a broad spectrum of relations, including the informal money-lending ubiquitous between relatives and neighbors. My own monthly financial inflows and outflows were likewise subject to daily discussion. This served to insert me into a household’s financial management processes. Thus, rather than recording a singular ‘true’ quantitative weekly or monthly accounting that existed in static form, our interviews captured the dynamic work of financial management as it took place within performative and technical acts of negotiations, diversions, bundling, and forestalling.  

The RDS passbook (2013)

In addition, when the women discussed their debts, three figures were usually cited with regard to the money owed: first, the original, principal amount owed. Second, the lender’s labh (profit), typically the interest amount. Finally, the lowest possible total amount that could be paid while still achieving closure of the debt. One rhetorical formulation I often heard encapsulates this latter notion: “if I owe 1,000 and pay 900, I still won’t get it” – with ‘it’ referring to the settlement or closure of a debt. 

Financial services offered by formal institutions are not set up to account for these processes. Similarly, conventional notions of household financial accounting that set debts/expenses against regular inflows are not applicable. Rather, these processes gesture toward a household ‘account’ as a shifting, multi-plane ledger where debt amounts (subdivided into principal and interest) are set against the lowest possible amount one can anticipate, strategize, or hope to pay, by leveraging time, external shocks (for either the borrower or lender), religious compassion, or other social or familial factors. The marginal gains from such reductions (and, on a related note, a consistent preference for round numbers and strategic rounding up or down to benefit the individual most in need) become part of broader financial management strategies in time. Loans exist as imminently repackageable into different sets of obligations — an enticement to a gold seller to bring one’s relatives to the shop, assurance to a shopkeeper that your business will stay with his store, appeals to an RDS field officer’s sense of Islamic piety and compassion for the poor.

Ultimately, my field research asks what it might look for an Islamic microfinance institution to take seriously the idea of people participating in microfinance, rather than just being subjects of it. This question then can be understood on multiple registers, from the socio-linguistics of financial vocabularies to technical aspects of calculation and record-keeping. And to ways in which Islamic notions about poverty, compassion, and social justice in economic affairs frame client relationships to the institution. 

Further readings:
-Part I of the blog, "Mobilizing Religion as Value Storage: Islamic Microfinance in Bangladesh as a Model for Poverty Alleviation". 

-Bridget Kustin's full Final Report 

-Islamic (Micro)finance: Culture, Context, Promise, Challenges, a report by Bridget Kustin for Financial Services for the Poor, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The report offers an introduction to the theological tenets of Islamic (micro)finance, a description of the most common products and services, and a global overview of the industry and its major institutions. 

Mobilizing Religion as Value Storage: Islamic Microfinance in Bangladesh as a Model for Poverty Alleviation (Part I)

By IMTFI Researcher Bridget Kustin

PART ONE: Research Questions and the ‘Islam’ of Islamic Microfinance 

Main Questions

The Islami Bank Bangladesh Limited (IBBL) is one of Bangladesh’s largest banks, offering commercial and consumer financing, tremendously popular remittances services for migrant workers, and an Islamic microfinance program for the rural poor, the Rural Development Scheme (RDS). Since its inception in 1983, the Islami Bank has described itself as a religious and financial institution dedicated to poverty alleviation -- an identification frequently invoked by employees during our conversations. The regulatory, staffing and monitoring structures of the IBBL are geared towards ensuring Shari’a compliance. In addition, IBBL's expansion strategy, corporate culture, and the semiotics of its branding and marketing reinforce it's status in Bangladesh as an Islamic institution. My research is an ethnography of finance, Islam, and poverty that explores the theoretical registers of Islamic (micro)finance client experience and institutional management threaded through the money, policy, and influence connecting Saudi Arabia to the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka to a small-town slum tucked along the Bay of Bengal.

IBBL headquarters, Dilkusha, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2010)

Building on previous research conducted during 2010 and 2011 at IBBL’s Dhaka headquarters and a slum community in the southeastern Cox’s Bazaar zila (district), this project takes as its starting point the idea that RDS mobilizes preexisting social and religious networks to render the ‘Islam’ in Islamic microfinance as a form of value storage. But what to make of ‘value’ as an economic category especially with attendant quantitative calculations regarding Islamic micro finance that has emerged as a new chapter in contentious debates over the efficacy and empowerment/self-fashioning potential of microfinance? 

For much of the ‘financial inclusion’-- oriented community of donors, NGOs, corporations, and start-ups, interest in Islamic microfinance is located in the question of whether clients can derive economic value from Islamic micro finance that exceeds the modest gains of conventional microfinance. And yet, the institutional leveraging of Islam to encourage or facilitate entry into formal banking suggests the importance of a more expansive field of ‘value’ or ‘values’ located within Islam, and registers of Islamic devotion or practice. What might these be? And how might Islamic microfinance encourage and enable poor clients to develop both their religious and economic subject positions? How do these political and ethical resonances filter into households, communities, and configurations of the state, financial institutions, and transnational development agencies? 

Research Procedures

Over 18 total months, from 2010 to 2014 I engaged in unstructured repeat interviews, casual conversations, and participant observation in office procedures and meetings, daily life, religious events, political unrest, and holidays. I was based in Dhaka for six months where I divided my time between the RDS and Sharia Secretariat divisions in IBBL headquarters, Islamic economic institutions, and the company of senior Islamic finance scholars and bankers. I spent 12 months in the slum community of Zinukpara (a pseudonym; all identifying details have been changed) in Cox’s Bazar district, where I conducted full-time participant observation among RDS clients to understand the place of Islamic microfinance alongside other financial obligations and liquidity sources. 

Zinukpara, a mixed Muslim, Hindu, and ethnic Burmese Buddhist Rakhine community, is adjacent to both a small town and vast expanses of rural, riverine lands used for agriculture and pisciculture. The broader district is home to the majority of Bangladesh’s 30,000 registered Rohingya refugeesIt and is close to land and river borders with Myanmar. An estimated 300,000 to 500,000 additional unregistered refugees live in makeshift camps or have been assimilated into the local population. As a result, poverty indicators in this district persist as among the lowest in the country, despite admirable gains in health, education, and child welfare elsewhere.

Socially responsible investment, social business, impact investment, corporate social responsibility, and ‘philanthrocapitalism’ leverage ethical orientations for market value while extolling opportunities for profit in poor, untapped markets. As such capitalist logics embrace market solutions to poverty alleviation and increasingly inform the structure and operations of socioeconomic ‘development.’ My research considers presumptions and categories regarding the financial life-worlds of poor clients that frame the goals and ‘outcomes’ of such programs. These considerations often contain implicit arguments about the efficacy and utility of RDS. I am forgoing a discussion of the ‘success’ of RDS in favor of an arguably prerequisite inquiry: the ways in which the institution might not know its client. Such ‘knowing’ includes the assumptions and possibilities contained in clients’ financial vocabularies, accounting practices in space and time, and the gendered structure of the household-as-economic-unit. Slippages also exist between institutional versus client understandings of the ‘Islam’ of Islamic micro finance. 

A Rakhine puja for improved job opportunities and financial success (2014)

The ‘Islam’ of Islamic microfinance 

For the IBBL, its paramount duty as an Islamic financial institution is Sharia compliance -- even as the terms of Sharia compliance for specific products, services, and ways of conducting business continue to evolve in the global Islamic (micro)finance industry. Clients in Zinukpara generally knew that shudh (interest, more accurately referred to in Arabic as riba) was haram (forbidden in Islam), and that the absence of shudh is a cornerstone of Islamic finance. But this was easily outweighed by the more urgent need for access to liquidity, from all possible sources. Clients explained that choosing between shudh or non-shudh options was a luxury, and not a true choice for the poor. Islam, clients explained, requires that the comparatively wealthy should treat the poor with respect and compassion, and to spare them confrontation with shame embedded in their poverty. As one woman in Zinukpara explained regarding her usual inability to repay debts: “I feel shame. I myself feel shame. What will I do? If I want to get some money from someone else, and they don’t lend to me, what can I do? If you want to call someone…and they say ‘no sister, no sister’…I will take my daughter and leave this house [instead of being kicked out].”

In this respect, IBBL occupies a top position among institutions with which clients interact. They are not made to feel poor or like beggars -- as opposed to their interactions with other sources of liquidity, whether competing microfinance institutions, friends, family, or shopkeepers. Respect and honor are understood as Islam manifest. This represents a critical difference in institutional versus client priorities and understanding of the enterprise of Islamic microfinance more broadly.Compassion and respect are embodied most clearly through RDS field officers’ willingness to accept khelafee (late weekly repayments), and clients will frequently appeal to the field officer or IBBL’s Islamic duty toward the poor. 

As a matter of course during repayment meetings, clients disobey, assert their claim to dignity despite their poverty, or object to bank policies they view as too uncompromising, via the bank’s proxy, the field officer. The particular forms that these interactions take should not be mistaken for client intransigence. They are instead demonstrations of labors that shift RDS and the IBBL down from a perch of ‘institution’ haloed by an affect of inaccessibility,  into the domain of the local village relationships. Scenes of negotiation during the repayment meetings show that women are neither lost under their debt nor ‘empowered’ (a classic, albeit broad goal of conventional microfinance since its inception). Rather, through these negotiations, the women understand themselves as participants in, rather than just subjects of Islamic microfinance.

Read Bridget Kustin's Final Report. 

Read Islamic (Micro)finance: Culture, Context, Promise, Challenges, a report by Bridget Kustin for Financial Services for the Poor, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The report offers an introduction to the theological tenets of Islamic (micro)finance, a description of the most common products and services, and a global overview of the industry and its major institutions. 

Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy

First cohort, IMTFI fellow Caroline Schuster is publishing a new book this month, Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy by UC Press (October 2015).  In this post, Carly shares and reflects on the process of writing the book, and how it grew out of her IMTFI research.

I first began research on this book about microfinance in Paraguay in 2006. It was a time when consumer and housing credit in the United States appeared to be a mainstay of the economy: cheap, ubiquitous, and seemingly endless. I returned to Paraguay for sustained fieldwork supported in part by the IMTFI in February of 2009 until August of 2010. It was a moment when big banks as well as microcredit borrowers in Paraguay were all grappling with how to understand a profoundly changed credit market. As such, my book is about global finance, just not from the dominant perspective of Wall Street. I tell the story of how microfinance loans are made, sold, and managed — their life cycle from creditworthiness, to repayment, to renewal — as a window into the on-the-ground workings of financial tools. This was crucial also because at that very moment those very tools were being hotly debated in the midst of the global financial crisis.

Social Collateral places microfinance within a wider suite of financial practices in Paraguay, which are especially vibrant in the “triple-frontera” or Tri-Border Area (TBA) with Argentina and Brazil. The zone is notorious as a regional commercial hub and for widespread smuggling. It is also an area awash in credit. My book rethinks the role of microcredit within social development financial inclusion policies in the TBA. Leveraging debt is crucial to transborder trade with activities ranging from buying on installment plans, credit from wholesalers, and borrowing from finance companies. While the group-borrowing and joint liability of microcredit is especially visible in the highly regulated world of non-profit development lending, I found that Paraguayans actually manage many forms of collective debt in the wider commercial context of the border. Ethnographic study of everyday financial practices helped me to see how “too big to fail” notions of overly dense financial entanglements among the biggest banks in the global financial system share remarkable similarities with “too small to fail” logic of microfinance and their intimate economic ties of social collateral. In the book I argue that this is an important context for considering new forms of collectivity and cohesion bound up in shared debts, as well as their potential futures. In her review, anthropologist Karen Ho (author of Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street) remarked that Social Collateral “demonstrates how microcredit programs depend on social density and help produce the very social collateral upon which they depend.”

My account of social collateral is necessarily an interwoven account about the feminization of solidarity lending. At its core is an economy of gender—from pink-collar financial work, to men’s committees, to women smugglers. In the book, I track how microfinance reshapes notions of what it means to be both a woman and a borrower. What emerges from these accounts are interdependencies that bind borrowers and lenders, financial technologies, and Paraguayan development in ways that structure both global inequality and global opportunity.

Pick up a copy of Social Collateral from University of California Press today!

Getting to Cagnipa: Field Notes from the Bicol Region, Philippines

By Federico Jose T. Lagdameo (working with Bernadette Gavino Gumba)

Google Maps declared that the barangay we were headed to was just 14 minutes away from where we hit the shore. As I announced this to the team we all had a good laugh. There was definitely no traffic in this area, but to say that we would get to Barangay Cagnipa in 14 minutes was to presume we were going there by helicopter! We weren’t. We were going there on foot.

Cagnipa is one of the more remote barangays of Garchitorena, a poor fourth class municipality of the province of Camarines Sur in the Philippines. The barangay or village is among the poorest in the district. Cagnipa is located in an island where there are no means of public transportation by land. People walked. They climbed up and down the hills and then they walked some more.

Like many other villages in Garchitorena’s islands, Cagnipa relies on what the sea provides. People fish when they can, and when they cannot due to the easterly winds, they turn to agriculture. Or they leave the village and seek work elsewhere as carpenters, construction workers, house helpers, bakers, store helpers, or whatever employment their limited education and skill-set can fetch them.

Our guide to Cagnipa offered us two choices: we could either climb and cross the steeper side of two eastern hills that separated Cagnipa from Burabod, the barangay on which we docked; or we could trudge along a roundabout path that would take us through the seaside mangroves of the island (a muddy forest at that time of the year), and then up the promontory of a hill west of Cagnipa. We chose the latter, deciding that the sights were better on this route.

The route we took was also the one that most of Cagnipa’s children took when they went to school at Burabod. The one-hour trek tested our endurance. We learned that that many of the school children had to quit school because it was so tough to make it everyday. They then become like their parents: poorly educated, shackled to poverty and at the mercy of the sea’s caprice.

We were asked by our guide why were we headed to Cagnipa. We answered that we were part of a research team surveying the town of Garchitorena for interviewing its fishing households about their usage of mobile money transfer and storage, or what was locally called “SMART Padala.” We said we were trying to find out how many made use of the technology, what problems they encountered while using it, and what was their general assessment of it. Our guide nodded at this, saying that his cousin at Cagnipa was actually one of the only two mobile money transfer providers there and that the villagers found the service convenient in sending and receiving money.

Indeed, not only in Cagnipa but in all the barangays we had surveyed, the consensus has been that “SMART Padala” was a more efficient and cost-effective way of sending and receiving money from loved ones and kin. People found its process to have been convenient and fast, and relatively inexpensive. When sending money, the senders inform the service provider of the SMART Padala number of the service provider from whom the recipient would claim the money. In addition, they inform the service provider of the amount they wish to send as well as the name and mobile number of the recipient. They hand the amount they are sending—together with the transaction fee—to the service provider who then secures the transaction. Once successful, the service provider then sends an SMS message to those who had sent the money, informing them of the confirmation and reference numbers. The receiver also receives an SMS with a reference and confirmation number. Once these are affirmed, the recipients are handed the amount sent after the small transaction fee has been deducted.

The process, however, was not without its problems. Since mobile money transfers make use of mobile network connections, their reliability and success is contingent on these connections remaining stable, uninterrupted and available. This requirement is made painfully acute during periods of calamities such as typhoons when power and network lines are down and people in the islands need to receive cash support from family members, friends, and relatives. The  remote location of the barangays make it difficult for their residents to secure constant network connection for their phones. This problem gets accentuated due to the insufficient number of mobile phone sites or stations that broadcast the network signal or connection.

Having arrived at Cagnipa after more than an hour’s trek from Burabod, we immediately proceeded to undertake the survey-interviews of 20 fishing households, even as the thought of the return trip weighed heavily on our heads. We split the barangay to four areas, dividing them up between each of us so as to cover more ground efficiently.

Most of the men were out in the fields. Those we were able to talk to informed us that some were harvesting coconuts while others were planting crops. Others were preoccupied with bets-free cockfighting. Still some were in Naga City and Manila, working as construction laborers. It emerged that as the easterly winds prevented the fishermen from going out to sea, the meager income opportunities in the village and in the town had to be supplemented with work elsewhere. We learnt through the interviews that those who left in search of work sent money back to their families whenever they could. And those they had left behind found the process of receiving money from husbands and children abroad much easier and faster with the mobile money transfer technology. As one respondent put it, “It’s as if they were here, handing to us the money for food and our children’s education.”

In retrospect, our research yielded five major findings regarding the usage of mobile money transfer and storage technology by Garchitorena fishing households: 1) The higher the educational level of fishing household heads, the greater the amount of money they had sent; 2) The higher the household income, the greater the amount of money sent to these households; 3) The higher the educational level of fishing household heads, the greater the amount of money received by these households; 4) The bigger the size of the fishing household, the greater the amount of money received by the household; and 5) The higher the household expense, the greater the amount of money received by the household.

It was interesting to note that while higher levels of educational qualifications appeared to have a positive influence on the usage of this technology, lower educational levels of household heads did not seem to limit the its use. This could imply that lower level of education was not a contributing factor to fishing household heads’ use of mobile money transfer services.

By the end of the day, we completed our interviews and plodded back to Burabod to our boat and a rendezvous with the other survey team members. Cagnipa continued to linger in our thoughts. In this very remote area, where many lives are dire and destitute, life flowed on. Separated by the vast expanse of sea and land, families at Cagnipa find themselves comforted by the thought that during the time of financial need they could easily send a relative or a loved one an SMS message seeking for help. And this help could arrive just minutes away.

See the final report, "Storing and Transferring Money in Cash-Strapped Fishing Municipality in the Bicol Region"

Revisiting the Fishers of Kerala with Janaki Srinivasan

In March of 2015 IMTFI arranged for a comprehensive visit to India to gather updates on four of their sponsored research projects, introduction can be found here. This final of four case studies takes a look at Kerala fishers with Janaki Srinivasan.

Janaki Srinivasan of the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore is interested in interrogating two major trends in digital culture today: "info-determinism" and "disintermediation." She had always been "interested in intermediaries, the importance of how the intermediary was introduced, and why he is always a villain. For example, why is the human auctioneer in the fish market perceived as an obstacle?" In our conversation, she also cited the work of Elisa Oreglia on the value of intermediaries and "how to re-embed them in market information systems" and grapple with "a sensible way to make them useful." She explained how just as technological determinism assumes that social development depends upon progress dictated by a history of novel inventions, informational determinism assumes that adopting new data paradigms (such as policies around transparency, open access or large-scale data mining) will necessarily transform society. 

The gradual removal of intermediaries in this schema is often understood as a part of this transformation. For example, even as the Indian online mega-store Flipkart puts many neighborhood merchants out of business, it is still lauded by enthusiasts for streamlining the labyrinthine supply chains of the country. In this regard, Srinivasan draws attention to the massive international Global Impact Study which has done the important work of documenting the role of so-called "infomediaries" around the world. In this study, the researchers found that many people did not prefer direct and unmediated access to information from personal computers. Whether it was information of interest about agriculture, health, or other topics citizens often preferred greater social transactions that involved local experts, authorities, and mediators serving as go-betweens. (The Global Impact Study was a groundbreaking and wide-reaching study funded by the sponsorship of Canada’s International Development Research Centre, and a grant to IDRC from the Global Libraries initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Dean of IIIT Balaji Parthasarathy, who is also one of Srinivasan's colleagues was a co-Principal Investigator of the study). 

Srinivasan argues that technology sometimes may introduce hierarchies rather than level them and technological innovation may not necessarily deliver the promised efficiency, access, participation, and social good. Working with Jenna Burrell, Professor at Berkeley and Richa Kumar, Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, Srinivasan presented her initial findings in  2012 on "A Work Practice Approach to Understanding Actors in Agricultural Markets: Revisiting the Fishermen of Kerala, India." (blogged here, Kumar has also done research on eChoupals.) 

In this project, this core group of three scholars were interested in testing the hypothesis that access to price information via cell phones would simplify transactions at fish markets and make the operation of the market fairer, more transparent, and less wasteful for all participants. (Conference paper at ACM Digital library can be found here).

In the intervening years since the beginning of the project in 2012, Srinivasan and her Bangalore colleagues have been busy with launching a new M.S. program in Digital Society. This YouTube video explains how this novel degree program is intended to bring social scientists, technologists, and designers together to build research and analysis that would take into account caste and gender in tackling development, health, and sustainability issues. The faculty at IIIT plan to work with an interdisciplinary cohort that is "not only corporate nor only government."     

Srinivasan's initial doctoral research impetus to examine digital delivery systems came from her interest in how the "right to information" was imagined. "In my dissertation, I compared two information-focused initiatives: one a political Right to Information campaign, another an 'apolitical' village information centre project." She "was looking at this whole idea of information as a development tool" and the competing interests of "different political actors." She noted that "info-centre projects categorically state that they don’t want to be involved in politics," even though case studies indicate that in reality it is difficult for ICT (information and communication technologies) initiatives to remain completely politically neutral. (To learn more about ICT efforts go to the National Informatics Centre.) 

Srinivasan began her analysis of ideologies about information by examining the history of right to information campaign in India. She observed that unlike lobbying for the Freedom of Information Act in the United States, which was led largely by journalists, India's 2005 Right to Information Act was the result of fifteen years of grassroots struggles spurred by the efforts of minimum wage laborers who had not received their wages for their work on public works projects.

Srinivasan recounts how prior to the legislation, citizens' access to many such public works projects were ostensibly limited by official secrets acts. There were also times when officials could use distinctions between paper and electronic records to prevent public review. The 1996 rallies in Rajasthan were critical for spurring the legislation. These demonstrations called for the locks on government files to be opened, and villagers demanded access to "entire journals" that logged data. According to Srinivasan, organizations like the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) established in 1988, were intended to play an important role in raising consciousness by launching the Information Villages initiative. These organizations were, however more interested in the provision of information rather than conceptualizing it as a right. Although a supporter of such transparency initiatives, Srinivasan remains skeptical of the idea that digital transparency alone would be sufficient to level economic inequities. 

For this project, Srinivasan, Burrell, and Kumar decided to empirically analyze Robert Jensen's "The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance, and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector," a famous study on Kerala fishermen which argued that universal access to information could have transformative effects on bottom-of-the-pyramid workers. Jensen's study had focused specifically on the effects of the introduction of mobile phone service throughout Kerala from 1997-2001 on fishing communities. In the book, Jenson makes the claim that "Using microlevel survey data, we show that the adoption of mobile phones by fishermen and wholesalers was associated with a dramatic reduction in price dispersion, the complete elimination of waste, and near-perfect adherence to the Law of One Price. Both consumer and producer welfare increased."

Srinivasan appreciated the fact that Jensen had done a good job of providing detail" in a study "done over time," and the research team decided to revisit and interrogate Jensen's paper written 15 years ago. Noting that social science research wasn't necessarily reproducible in the way that other kinds of scientific research might be, she emphasized that Vizhinjam was "not a place frozen in time" and "not a controlled experiment." Srinivasan was also interested questions that Jensen brought up in terms of "wastage." The team found themselves asking somewhat different questions based on their observations: "If you do eliminate waste, who are the people who get affected?  The fish are never wasted in terms of being thrown back into sea." Although they might not circulate in formal markets, the fish have an afterlife in "home-based drying, salting, or processing."

Being interested in "the thinking behind the project," the researchers found themselves with "similar questions" about phone use in fishing communities but different questions regarding the roles played by "class, caste, and gender" in the busy markets. They were also faced with the challenge of "how to operationalize" their questions in an in-depth study. The researchers revisiting Jensen did go to one of his three sites in northern Kerala, Chaliyam, but they thought it might be valuable to acknowledge the fact that Kerala has 500 kilometers of coastline and that there were significant differences "in fish, in vessels, in credit relations, and who they sold to" across the region.

Srinivasan was also curious about why there was "no mention of gender in Jensen." The team realized that "women did not participate in the North at all; in the South there were a lot of women." The economic importance of women in other ways was evident around Vizhinjam. There were a number of establishments that offered a credit market to those able to liquidate holdings in precious metals, especially gold accessories that were marriage gifts. (For research on gold loans and importance of wealth stored in women's jewelry see IMTFI researcher Joseph's work here). 

Srinivasan's team chose Vizhinjam to the south of the state of Kerala renowned for tourist beaches as well as fishing expertise. She added further that "Kerala has centuries of history with a long relation to migration, including movement to Gulf states. You acquire connections that make you cosmopolitan. I found it interesting because the older generation in the region had in reality traveled and had ties especially in the Middle East. This gap between perception and reality I found very telling."

Srinivasan described the initial challenge of making sense of the complex scene at "an auction where everyone was bidding for piles of fish" and it was difficult to track "fishermen’s movements." She chuckled about the "chaos on that first day" and at coping with the "decibel levels." She recalls how "monitoring digital platforms, the formation of identities, and caste groups proved to be much more challenging than generating abstract and elegant 'equations' divorced from the messiness of reality. There might be fifteen auctions at the same time, with people pushing and shoving."

Srinivasan described how the Vizhinjam field site differed from where she had worked in Pondicherry where the MSSRF information centers dispensed information about government schemes through kiosks, public address systems, or websites rather than text messages on mobile phones. There she had been struck by "how categorically they wanted to divorce their activities from politics," even though "everyday politics operating in the village" made the "universal idea of information being good" was complicated by the "facts that information was A) not just one thing and B) of course it is political."

The research team also reviewed existing literature about the economic behavior of farmers around price information even though fishermen who are landless by profession, face specific difficulties different from that of farmers especially with regards to access to credit. (For more on farmers, prices, and information, see our story about IMTFI researcher Nithya Joseph and her research on silk markets).

In mapping economic relations the team also realized that when working with "the category of producer and consumer" it was often assumed that the two parties "did not actually interact," despite the apparent disintermediation of their transactions by access to cell phone data. Hybrid characters like the invester/auctioneer proved to be "critical from a design perspective" in understanding "different actors, kinds of phones, where did the auctioneer come from, and at why price information would even matter."(As a case in point IMTFI researcher Mani Nandhi's study focussed on credit relations available to rickshaw pullers in Delhi which shows that gaining access to credit could involve coercive financial relationships as well).

In understanding how fish market transactions operated in the 60s through the 80s, "it might be easy to see these earlier relations as exploitative, because it was not a freely operating market; it was one that was structured in particular ways, and social campaigns and government interventions were not equally useful." But the introduction of cell phone technology didn't necessarily make the market more democratic, Srinivasan argues, because of distinctions between "large vendors vs. small vendors." In other words, according to Srinivasan, "the bigger you were as a player, the more important price information was. Huge volume was needed, when we represent something as regulating and operating by economic laws. What about its history allows the market to operate and mobile phones to be useful? For me it was a useful extension to my dissertation," which looked at how information worked as a development tool for a political movement and an NGO-based initiative, as a way to represent "a free market conception of development and how the world works" and apply it to a case in which "a free market conception of development used information as a development tool."

Srinivasan noted that in 2013 "the fisherman are not really literate, although the state has high literacy; many had learned to make use of the phone's calling function, or they would remember the last two digits" to pick out the right number from a contact list. Some kept notebooks, because even if they were not literate they were numerate. Cell phones weren't only used instrumentally for economic purposes but "they used mobile phones for music out on the sea." Their social connections between the fishers were also much more than merely transactional.  Srinivasan pointed out that even the youngest fisherman or auctioneers maintained traditional ties with the church tax collector, which were often enhanced by new technologies rather than weakened by them. A younger fishermen and the young church tax collector from a fisher family said that "Facebook was important as a way to connect with the world; it was different from their parents' generation, who were from a close set of people with no ties outside of village.

In their research the researchers have worked with local informants and translators in the field site to map a dense multiplicity of economic relations in which there were many types of producer, many types of consumer, many uses for cell phones, many different types of equipment for fishing. Among the many actors in the scene one would find auctioner/investor figures and export agents, wholesale agents, fish vendors, waste procurers, and even local religious leaders. 

For my visit, the researchers had provided me with images that were intended to map the dense network of participants in the harbor who were engaged in the buying and selling of fish as well as many other kinds of transactions. From the research team's photographs I recognized the mosque and church that shared the Vizhinjam skyline with tall palm trees. Vizhinjam is not very far from the regional capital of Thiruvananthapuram, which has a busy international airport and a vibrant political culture that had shut down the streets during my visit. Anticipating political disturbance on the street I waited to visit the docks until Sunday, a day when most of the activity focused on the maintenance of boats. On the quiet Sunday when I visited Vizhinjam, the main auction was closed and churches were holding services, there was plenty of activity around the marine food supply that ranged from managing family economics to the transactions of small roadside vendors selling meat who were doing brisk business. (Find IMTFI funded work on how small ruminants like goats function as a form of capital among those who live on less than a dollar a day here). 

Srinivasan also pointed out that "whole idea of collaborating closely on ethnographic research" involved a lot of coordination among the three researchers who were in different work environments. For instance Burrell was yet to visit the field site at the time of the interview. Nonetheless the group was able to have what Srinivasan described as a deep and lasting conversation about methodology as they stayed in touch through frequent Skype calls. "There were things we wanted to discuss throughout the process and recent things that emerged from the nature of the collaboration." Each saw the field site from her side through "disparate pictures and field notes" but also supplemented the research with new expertise. "Richa had worked with farmers in India and had seen how information circulates in that context, which was tremendously useful." Of course, she admitted that there was sometimes "ethnographic confusion" and many challenges in trying to get "a complete picture in three months" even as each of them would "jump in with questions." Srinivasan said "as a methodological path, it very useful, even if the connectivity was not always ideal. We started with plan of Skyping two times a week, and Jenna would read our notes and come up with set of questions. Jenna did a fantastic job on figuring out the political economy of the region."

In conclusion, Srinivasan shared her interest to work on mobile payments and exploring questions regarding gender, particularly as she has personally encountered stories of women and the work of Lilly Irani about what counts as computing. As the MSc Digital Society program gets underway, she continues to pursue multiple collaborations, including "putting our students in touch with CIS," the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. Srinivasan has also begun thinking about the possible repercussions of the AADHAAR biometric identity card as another case study for exploring info-determinism, "it's interesting to think about biometrics as an ideology, about agents and enrollments, about the nationwide rollout of standardized numbers, who will come up to enroll, what documents of identity will be accepted, and how intermediaries will function."AADHAAR promotes what she calls "the idea of a stable identity" while overlooking "people’s desire to negotiate their visibility to the state." She is also enthusiastic about working with other collaborators, as she develops her ideas about info-determinism, which might be "even bigger than technological determinism as a bias, because it ignores social structures, ignores the agencies of people who do something with the information."

Srinivasan, along with Elisa Oreglia, will be joining the next cohort at IMTFI Fellows to develop new research in,  "Intermediaries, Cash Economies, and Technological Change in Myanmar and India." Initial findings will be presented at the IMTFI Annual Conference, coming to UC Irvine in April 2016~stay tuned!


[Photo Credits: Janaki Srinivasan and Elizabeth Losh]