Response to Inequalities under Divergent Development Strategies A Study of Two Villages in Gujarat and Kerala

Abstract

This thesis examines how people living under divergent development models respond newlineto inequality, and how such responses contribute to the reproduction,recalibration, or contestation of developmental legitimacy over time. Inequality is treated as a constitutive feature of development, embedded in how growth is organized, justified, and temporally sequenced. Moving beyond outcome-based evaluation, the study analyzes how belief, compliance, and alignment are sustained through deferred expectations, staged promises, and managed futures despite persistent exclusions. Empirically, the thesis examines Gujarat and Kerala, frequently represented as contrasting newlinedevelopment trajectories, one centered on capital-intensive growth and the other newlineon redistributive and rights-based commitments. Rather than comparing performance, the study investigates how both trajectories have been transformed into ideological templates that organize aspiration, authority, and legitimacy through the management of expectations over time. Using a layered analytical framework spanning strategic policy, mediating discourse, and grounded everyday life, the thesis demonstrates how development persists through the deferral of disillusionment, the redistribution of risk, and the absorption of contradiction. Development is thus redefined as a recursive hegemonic process in which legitimacy is continually reassembled through temporal governance. newline