This book covers the sensitive real-life story of Gulzari and Parvati, their marriage in Lahore in 1942, the eruption of violence and carnage, their flight to New Delhi just a month before the partition and their aristocratic lifestyle that slowly crumbled (so did their love for each other). An interesting account of a man who struggles to keep up with his swanky lifestyle he once enjoyed as one of the richest landed families of Lahore, who never knew what it meant to work for a living! Slowly he watches everything crumble before him…including his relationships and his financial standing.
This book has been prepared by the Network of Rural and Agrarian Studies (NRAS), an all-India network of scholars, researchers, civil society practitioners, farmers, students, and activists engaged in issues related to rural and agrarian India. The book is born out of a recognition of the urgent need to address the extant erasure of rural livelihoods, depletion of natural resources and the pauperization of rural communities, which current policies and ideas continue to perpetuate. It is an attempt to provide a critical review of the key structural factors and especially mainstream policies and programmes that have contributed to rural India's current economic, social and ecological situation. By developing a critique of these approaches, this book attempts to put forward alternative ideas, paradigms and methodologies to address these entrenched and recurring problems. The key questions raised and the responses analysed in this book would contribute significantly to the emergence of an alternative vision for the development of rural India. NRAS encourages the use, reproduction, and dissemination of material in this book. Material in this book may be copied, downloaded, and printed for private study, research, and teaching purposes, or for use in non-commercial products or services, provided that appropriate acknowledgement of NRAS as the source is given and that NRAS's endorsement of users' views, products, or services is not implied in any way.
This annual report monitors and evaluates agricultural policies spanning all six continents, including the 36 OECD countries, the five non-OECD EU Member States, and 13 emerging economies.
The doctoral students of the economist and teacher Venkatesh B. Athreya organized a seminar in his honor in January 2016. This book is a collection of the papers presented at that seminar and a few invited contributions on the theme of agriculture and rural India with special emphasis on the experience of economic reforms since the 1990s.
The book discusses important developments emerging around the land questions in India in the context of India’s neoliberal economic development and its changing political economy. It covers many issues that have been impinging the political economy in land and livelihoods in India since the 1990s, examining the land question from diverse methodological standpoints. Most of the chapters rely on evidence generated through primary surveys in different parts of the country. The book, via its diversity of approaches and methodologies, brings out new and hitherto unexplored and/or less researched issues on the emerging land question in India. The range of issues addressed in the volume encompasses the contemporary developments in the political economy of land, land dispossession, SEZs, agrarian changes, urbanisation and the drive for the commodification of land across India. The authors also examine role of the state in promoting the capitalist transformation in India and continuities and changes emerging in the context of land liberalisation and market-friendly economic reforms.
This book explores the second-order effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on social and economic development in India. The chapters in this volume provide theoretical perspectives and empirical insights from a range of disciplines including history, economics, water management, food and nutrition security, agriculture, rural management, public health, urbanization, gender studies and development of the marginalized. It discusses the pressing questions that have been raised by the disruption caused by the pandemic and proposes insights and interventions to build a more just, sustainable and united post-COVID India.
Malnutrition is endemic in India. In 2015-16 some 38% of preschool children were stunted and 21% were wasted, while more than half of Indian mothers and children were anemic. There are many posited explanations for the high rates of malnutrition in India, but surprisingly few discuss the role of Indian diets, particularly the affordability of nutritious diets given low wages and the significant structural problems facing India’s agricultural sector. This study was undertaken to address knowledge gaps around the affordability of nutritious diets in rural India. To do so we used nationally representative rural price and wage data to estimate the least cost means of satisfying India-specific dietary recommendations, referred to as the Cost of a Recommended Diet (CoRD), and assess the affordability of this diet relative to male and female wages for unskilled laborers. Although we find that dietary costs increased substantially over 2001-2011 for both men and women, rural wage rates increased more rapidly, implying that nutritious diets became substantially more affordable over time. However, in absolute terms nutritious diets in 2011 were still expensive relative to unskilled wages, constituting approximately 50-60% of male and about 70-80% of female daily wages, and were often even higher relative to minimum wages earned from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Since many poor households have significant numbers of dependents and substantial non-food expenditure requirements, it follows that nutritious diets are often highly unaffordable for the rural poor; we estimate that 45-64% of the rural poor cannot afford a nutritious diet that meets India’s national food-based dietary guidelines. Our results point to the need to more closely monitor food prices through a nutritional lens, and to shift India’s existing food policies away from their heavy bias towards cereals. Achieving nutritional security in India requires a much more holistic focus on improving the affordability of the full range of nutritious food groups and ensuring that economic growth results in sustained income growth for the poor.
Neoliberalism is easily one of the most powerful discourses toemerge within the social sciences in the last two decades, and the number of scholars who write about this dynamic and unfolding process of socio-spatial transformation is astonishing. Even more surprising though is that there has, until now, not been an attempt to provide a wide-ranging volume that engages with the multiple registers in which neoliberalism has evolved. The Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism seeks to offer a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of neoliberalism by examining the range of ways that it has been theorized, promoted, critiqued, and put into practice in a variety of geographical locations and institutional frameworks. With contributions from over 50 leading authors working at institutions around the world the volumes seven sections will offer a systematic overview of neoliberalism’s origins, political implications, social tensions, spaces, natures and environments, and aftermaths in addressing ongoing and emerging debates. The volume aims to provide the first comprehensive overview of the field and to advance the established and emergent debates in a field that has grown exponentially over the past two decades, coinciding with the meteoric rise of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology, state form, policy and program, and governmentality. It includes a substantive introductory chapter and will serve as an invaluable resource for undergraduates, graduate students, and professional scholars alike.
This book studies the management challenges and possibilities in sustaining farmer producer organisations (FPOs). It goes beyond the conventional metrics of cost-benefit analysis by drawing on 15 case studies of diverse FPOs spread across India to fill a significant knowledge-practice gap in the domain of producer collectives. The book explores issues of ownership and governance, studies the empirical basis for policy decisions on FPOs, and provides actionable insights and knowledge, keeping in mind the complexity of the institutional design of an FPO. It also discusses the envisioned role of civil society organisations in supporting FPOs and looks at the kind of institutional innovations that are needed to create a cohesive ecosystem for FPOs. A unique collaborative project jointly authored by academics and development practitioners, the book will be of use to students and researchers of agricultural economics, environment and business, agricultural development, environmental economics, rural studies, entrepreneurship, and South Asian studies. It will also be of interest to development professionals, civil society organisations, and policymakers.
Despite 250 years of land reform all over the World, important land inequalities remain, especially in Latin America and Southern Africa.While in these countries, there is near consensus on the need for redistribution, much controversy persists around how to redistribute land peacefully and legally, often blocking progress on implementation.This book focuses on the "how" of land redistribution in order to forge greater consensus among land reform practitioners and enable them to make better choices on the mechanisms of land reform. Reviews and case studies describe and analyze the al.
