In the promised land of participation, what remained was fatigue

I arrived carrying tidy words: collectives, participation, capacity building. On paper, everything was in place—Producer Groups formed years ago, meetings scheduled, trainings delivered, cadres appointed.

But the field does not speak in frameworks.

It speaks in pauses. In people not showing up. In questions that no longer sound rhetorical.

“Tell us—was this profit or loss?”

That question followed me from village to village.

As dusk fell in rural Jharkhand, a field trainer accompanying me voiced a fear the road itself did not.

When money doesn’t arrive, meaning dissolves

Almost every conversation returned to the same point: money that never arrived.

Payments for imli. For lac. For produce sold years ago. Bonuses promised, never transferred. Accounts emptied long ago.

People told me they borrowed from SHGs just to get by—waiting for payments that were always deferred.

This wasn’t an operational delay. It was a breach of trust.

“Earlier, if we sold outside, we got money immediately.”

After hearing this enough times, I stopped asking why meetings weren’t happening.

The writing was on the wall, and the silence pressed in.

Women gathered outside their homes, discussing livelihoods and delayed payments

Meetings That Exist Only in Registers

Officially, meetings were meant to happen twice a month. In reality, some hadn’t happened in six months. Others in nearly a year.

People spoke about:

• waiting endlessly for others to arrive

• office bearers not showing up

• time spent with no decisions

Eventually, people stopped coming.

Not because they didn’t care—but because caring had become expensive.

“Even if we go house to house and call people, they don’t come.”

Participation, I realised, isn’t a value. It’s a relationship.

And relationships don’t survive neglect.

A meeting space shaped by systems that schedule participation but fail to sustain it.

Training everywhere, practice nowhere

Trainings were everywhere.

Kharif crops. Compost. Quality checks. Natural farming. The topics changed. The outcome didn’t.

People told me they:

• didn’t grow what they were trained to grow

• couldn’t find inputs at designated stores

• never sorted or graded produce

• were never visited for quality checks

“We were trained, but we could not practice.”

Training had become performative—completed, recorded, moved past.

Unused knowledge doesn’t disappear. It curdles—into disappointment. And then into silence.

In rural Jharkhand, training happens on schedule; practice waits.

Buildings without life

Buildings stood where activity was meant to be. Toilets without water. Facilities “ready” but never functional.

Crops spoiled for lack of storage. Tomatoes rotted. Potatoes sat in homes.

Infrastructure without systems doesn’t enable. It reminds.

Infrastructure stands ready while systems lag behind.

Leaving the field with questions

We often ask communities to stay engaged.

To remain patient.

To trust the process.

The field asked something else:

Who is allowed to be impatient?

And who pays the cost of waiting?

I didn’t leave with answers.

But I left knowing this:

Silence in the field is never apathy.

It is evidence.

Training persists, even as outcomes remain unresolved.

Written by Meher Suri, drawing on fieldwork in rural Jharkhand (2019). This piece reflects patterns observed across sites; quotations are anonymised and used with care.