Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami

Raja Swamy's book "Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami" examines the role of humanitarian aid and disaster reconstruction in India after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It explores the contested aims and mixed outcomes of state policy, humanitarian aid, and local resistance in post-disaster reconstruction. Using the case study of Nagapattinam District, the book shows how the state-led, multilaterally financed, and NGO-mediated reconstruction prioritized the displacement of coastal fisher populations. It highlights the ambiguous role of NGOs involved in the distribution of aid and the agency and strategic actions of the primary recipients of aid, the fishers of Nagapattinam, as they struggled with the conditional receipt of humanitarian gifts.

Format: Hardback
Length: 232 pages
Publication date: 29 June 2021
Publisher: The University of Alabama Press

Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami is a critical examination of the role of humanitarian aid and disaster reconstruction in the context of neoliberalizing states in the contemporary era. In the face of growing scholarly and public concern over disaster capitalism and the tendency of states and powerful international financial institutions to view disasters as opportunities to build back better, Raja Swamy offers an ethnographically rich account of post-disaster reconstruction, its contested aims, and the mixed outcomes of state policy, humanitarian aid, and local resistance. Using the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as a case study, Swamy investigates the planning and implementation of a reconstruction process that sought to radically transform the geography of a coastal district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Drawing on an ethnographic study conducted in Tamil Nadu's Nagapattinam District, Swamy demonstrates how and why the state-led, multilaterally financed, and NGO-mediated reconstruction prioritized the displacement of coastal fisher populations. Exploring the substantive differences shaping NGO action, specifically in response to core political questions affecting the well-being of their ostensible beneficiaries, this account also centers the political agency of disaster survivors and their allies among NGOs in contesting the meanings of recovery while navigating the process of reconstruction.

If humanitarian aid brought NGOs and fishers together as givers and recipients of aid, it also revealed in its workings competing and sometimes contradictory assumptions, goals, interests, and strategies driving the fraught historical relationship between them.

In conclusion, Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the complex dynamics of post-disaster reconstruction in the context of neoliberal globalization. Swamy's ethnographic study offers a rich and nuanced account of the ways in which state policy, humanitarian aid, and local resistance interact to shape the outcomes of reconstruction efforts in a coastal district in Tamil Nadu. By highlighting the political agency of disaster survivors and their allies among NGOs, the book sheds light on the ways in which disaster capitalism and neoliberal ideology can be contested and subverted. This is an important read for scholars, policymakers, and activists working to promote more equitable and sustainable disaster response and reconstruction in the years to come.

Weight: 510g
Dimension: 239 x 163 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780817320973