Bodpagaun project, a case of economic development

The developmental schemes carried out in this community involved agricultural and dairy programs which were financed and managed for several years by international aid agencies. These economic programs were designed to provide the Tibetan community with a stable means of livelihood, but the programs were generally unsuccessful due, for the most part, to social forces in the community that blocked the implementation of the economic programs. By examining the present economic foundations of the Tibetan settlement, we see that the same social factors that foiled the planned economic programs also worked to encourage other means of economic development. Known as the Bodpagaun Project, this instance of engineered development serves as a heuristic example for investigating the ways that sociocultural factors may influence attempts to initiate development in small societies of South Asia. The sociocultural factors particularly prevalent in the history of the Bodpagaun Project are social groups and religious values, both of which had a great deal to do with the outcome of the individual development programs as well as with the relative success of the overall project itself.