In this chapter, I study the project text – programme plans, handbook and reports – produced by a development agency that has been in operation since 1995, the Nagaland Empowerment of People through Economic Development project (NEPED). A key feature of the approach followed by the project officials is people-centred participation in the project, drawing on the community's ‘social capital’ to act together as a community.

I examine the project outcome as a ‘participant outsider’: one who has had (limited) access to the project staff (planners and implementers) by drawing on beneficiaries’ experiences through participant observation, a household survey and interviews, apprenticeship with a farmer to understand the art of cultivation and through spending considerable time in a post-project beneficiary village learning what people thought about the project and how they had participated in it. The project perspective is thus measured against the subjective experience of the beneficiaries (and non-beneficiaries) engaged in the development programme. The key focus here is the part of the NEPED project through which soft loans favourable to farmers were provided in a programme called the ‘Revolving Fund’ to improve farming in the village of Leangkonger located in Tuensang district of Nagaland. The chapter thus builds on the previous Chapters 5 and 6 where I discussed the questions of patronage and control over labour by village khel (ward-sector) leaders and the Baptist Church. I take a few loan beneficiaries as central figures to demonstrate how loans and relending operate within the emerging social structure of the village.

The chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part I discuss the NEPED project and in the second part, I engage with key project beneficiaries through listening to their life histories and how they received development grants and reshaped project goals in an attempt to give new meaning to the concepts of the project's success or failure. This chapter contributes to the broader argument on how the agency of the actors who participate in swidden (jhum) improvement programmes should not be discounted when discussing development interventions. The villagers, who are represented in the project literature as ‘objects of development’ – as simple and poor beneficiaries – exercise their agency in ways that significantly shape project outcomes.