local woman who has worked with local SHGs for a long time. In addition, the distinction between these two types of facilitators goes far beyond the difference in facilitator appearance. They represent different paradigms of state-backed community development programs. In the resource blocks, a team of visitors from Andhra Pradesh is viewed as a representative of the Government of India whose task is to link poorer women to the state. They are viewed as bringing experience, training and services to the village with clear goals for the short- and longterm.<sup>17</sup> In Intensive Blocks however, a team of local women, provided with little visible support from the government, are viewed as community members building on existing networks and capacities for long-term change. Their relationship to the state is not obvious – they are building on the Rajasthani sub-national tradition of social mobilization through non-state actors. Their goals, and their alignment with state development plans, are much less explicit.

The decision to have two separate development strategies within a single state was unexpected and sudden. It emerged in January 2013, two years after the program began and when it was 18 months behind schedule. The initial plan, formulated in 2011, featured a phased rollout to approximate a randomized control trial: All blocks in poorer districts in Rajasthan were ranked in order of their Human Development Indices. Within each district certain blocks were randomly assigned to the NRLM program for immediate rollout. All other blocks were supposed to serve as controls until 2016. A baseline survey, conducted in 2011, ensured that the treatment and control blocks were balanced along the lines of key indicators (as will be seen later in this paper). However, when the program fell behind schedule and there were significant delays in implementation the plan had to be modified. Resource Blocks and Intensive Blocks were allocated randomly _within_ the treatment group, and NGOs were then invited to submit applications to partner with the government in the Intensive blocks. This was done through announcements in newspapers and regional workshops in the summer of 2012. In early 2013, the lists for Resource blocks and Intensive blocks were made public. The intervention started soon afterwards -- SERP staff arrived in Rajasthan to implement programs within six weeks of this announcement. Our surveys were conducted a year after these announcements giving the program time to take effect.

# Data and Research Methods

Our comparative mixed-methods approach gathered both qualitative and quantitative data from Resource Blocks and Intensive Blocks. The qualitative data were gathered between July and

> 17 The National Mission Management Unit (NMMU) of the NRLM had planned in 2012 to create 100 community managed and community driven intensive Resource Blocks across the country. The goal was to develop, through an intensive social mobilization process, a few blocks (2-6 blocks in NRLP/NRLM states) as role models. In the design of this strategy, it was emphasized that experienced project professionals, drawn from resource organizations, would receive considerable support from the cluster, block, district and state level to spearhead social mobilization and institution building.

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