This study revolves around a village in the southernmost part of Bihar state in India. This region is filled with fluoride contamination in groundwater, which causes fluorosis disease among households. Fluorosis incidences affected generations, making people partially or entirely incapable of social and economic reproduction. In response, state, non-state and private enterprises intervened in this village to provide access to ‘safe’ drinking water. These twenty-three years of interventions introduced different technologies and infrastructures which governed the village’s households as a development subject. However, narratives, observations, and government reports express that these policy-based technological interventions failed miserably due to poor operation, maintenance, and acceptance of the introduced infrastructures. Oral narratives and historical accounts tell us that geography and infrastructures go hand in hand to render marginality among the households of this village.
This study explores the historical interventions of fluoride removal programs in the study village and how it created unequal power relationship to access the benefits of programs. This study further explore the role of local state actors in provision of public health programs to the households. This study uses a mixed method approach to understand these objectives. Through the literature of 'anthropologt of the state' and 'political ecology', this paper argues that public health programs is a tool to generate power among the local actors where households knowingly or unknowingly becomes a subject of development.
