Challenging the Westphalian view of international relations, which focuses on the sovereignty of states and the inevitable potential for conflict, the authors from the Borderlands Study Group reconceive borders as capillaries enabling the flow of material, cultural, and social benefits through local communities, nation-states, and entire regions. By emphasizing local agency and regional interdependencies, this metaphor reconfigures current narratives about the China India border and opens a new perspective on the long history of the Silk Roads, the modern BCIM Initiative, and dam construction along the Nu River in China and the Teesta River in India.
Together, the authors show that positive interaction among people on both sides of a border generates larger, cross-border communities, which can pressure for cooperation and development. India China offers the hope that people divided by arbitrary geo-political boundaries can circumvent race, gender, class, religion, and other social barriers, to form more inclusive institutions and forms of governance.
This chapter asks and answers three important questions: against what kinds of “state” entities are fundamental rights applicable (the “actor” question); the forms of “state” action that stand subject to scrutiny (the “form” question); and the effect of unconstitutionality on the validity of a law (the “effect” question). It specially focuses on the actor question due to obfuscations surrounding the right response. Mapping the judicially expounded definitions of “state” for purposes of the fundamental rights chapter, ie. Part III of the Constitution, through the times, the chapter argues that the structuralist definition that came to hold sway post the BCCI verdict needs re-evaluation as it is both over- and under-inclusive. Instead, the idea of “agency”, relied upon in some of the earlier verdicts, needs further development to render the enquiry (of whether an entity is “state”) a functionalist one that closely examines what the body does rather than how it is structured. Structure can at best raise a set of prima facie presumptions on the applicability, or otherwise, of fundamental rights but can never be a decisive enough test, opening itself up as it does for gaming the structure to defeat individual rights and interests.
The Fundamental Right to Property enjoys the unique distinction of not only being the second most contentious provision in the drafting of the Constitution, but also the most amended provision, and the only fundamental right to be ultimately abolished in 1978. This book chapter narrates the evolution of the right to property in the Indian Constitution, and outlines the chequered trajectory of its doctrinal development, following the First (1951), Fourth (1955), Seventh (1956), Seventeenth (1964), Twenty-Fourth (1971), Twenty-Fifth (1972), Twenty-Sixth (1972), Twenty-Ninth (1972), Thirty-Fourth (1974) and Thirty-Ninth (1975) constitutional amendments. Ultimately, the Forty Fourth Constitutional Amendment, 1978, deprived the ‘right to property’ of its ‘fundamental right’ status. The trajectory of the right to property in the Constitution, as seen from the drafting of the original constitutional property clause, and its evolution through judicial interpretation, legislation, and constitutional amendment, demonstrates the Indian State’s continual attempts to reshape property relations in society to achieve its goals of economic development and social redistribution. Each iteration of the property clause favoured property rights of certain groups and weakened those of others and was the product of intense contestation between competing groups that used both the legislature and the judiciary to further their interests. Concomitantly, lurking behind the development of the Supreme Court’s doctrinal jurisprudence is the Court’s fear of arbitrariness of State action.
The current trajectory of urbanization in India is expected to take its urban population to over 900 million by the year 2050. Natural growth and in-migration from rural hinterlands are the major contributors to this growth. The added needs of these populations, for housing, basic public amenities or healthcare services, have not been adequately addressed by government policies and schemes in place. This chapter explores the foundations of such policies and the institutional structures mandated to provide these basic services, specifically urban sanitation, in order to understand the reasons for the gaps between the needs and provisioning. It finds that there is striking institutional and individual insensitivity towards the urban poor marked by a lack of state political and administrative priority for addressing their sanitation needs. Reasons for this transgress beyond the mere administrative to larger societal factors that play a silent but key role in this apathy. Social hierarchies integral to India’s collective, allow the lack of institutional accountability that translates into such insensitivity, and thereby under-performance with regard to government schemes. The absence of disincentives and lack of definite inter-departmental collaborative mechanisms are other major reasons for the divergence in population needs and services delivered. The chapter concludes that providing voice to the marginalized, sensitization and political will are key steps towards building institutional structures that will bring in greater coordination and accountability and realistically provide the much needed services.
In recent years the water sector has undergone profound institutional, economic and political transformations. Some countries have encouraged privatization of water services, but in many cases this has provoked adverse reaction to such a neoliberal and market-based approach to this common shared but essential resource.
This book goes beyond the ideology of the public versus private water regime debate, by focusing on the results of these types of initiatives to provide better water services, particularly in urban settings. It provides numerous examples of alternative models, to show who is responsible for implementing such systems and what are their social, institutional and technical-scientific characteristics. Policies are analysed in terms of their implications for employees and residents.
The book presents a new combinatory approach of water regimes, based on several international case studies (Argentina, Bolivia, China, France, Germany, India, South Africa and the USA, plus a comparison of three cities in Africa) presenting specific challenges for water models. These case studies demonstrate the successes and problems of a range of private sector involvements in the provision of water services, and provide examples of how small-scale systems can compare with larger-scale more technical systems.
This chapter draws on core legal literature to outline the key features of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), as well as to identify areas that have generated discord and would benefit from further research, analysis and commentary. This chapter first discusses the basic features of the FCCC, in particular its character as a ‘framework’ convention, the nature of commitments it contains, the categories of Parties it creates and the fundamental principles that it enshrines. The chapter next outlines the governance architecture that the FCCC establishes, in particular the Conference of Parties (COP) and its powers, the process of decision-making in the COP, and the legal status of COP decisions. Finally, this chapter considers avenues for the evolution of the climate change regime, in particular through the adoption of amendments and protocols.
This book chapter provides an historical and legal introduction to the UN climate change regime. It reviews the development of the regime, from the emergence of the climate change issue in the 1980s through the adoption of the 1992 UN Framework on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the 2001 Marrakech Accords, the 2007 Bali Action Plan, the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, the 2010 Cancun Agreements, and the 2011 Durban Platform. The chapter outlines the principal elements of the legal regime, and concludes with some brief observations about the future direction of the UN climate change regime.
This chapter analyses how migrant women in two specific kinds of paid work—industrial/factory work and home-based work—articulate, understand and perceive economic, social and spatial mobility. Drawing upon fieldwork among women workers living around two industrial estates in the city of Delhi, this chapter argues that the economic agency brought about by paid employment is situated within and shaped by the spatial mobility offered by the city, and the enabling nature of city spaces in relation to the rural. The narratives bring forth complex articulations of social status and honour which, while always being relational to the meanings attached to the rural, call for new ways of understanding and engendering the concept of mobility for migrant women.
This volume decentres the view of urbanisation in India from large agglomerations towards smaller urban settlements. It presents the outcomes of original research conducted over three years on subaltern processes of urbanization. The volume is organised in four sections. A first one deals with urbanisation dynamics and systems of cities with chapters on the new census towns, demographic and economic trajectories of cities and employment transformation. The interrelations of land transformation, social and cultural changes form the topic of the “land, society, belonging” section based on ethnographic work in various parts of India (Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu). A third section focuses on public policies, governance and urban services with a set of macro-analysis based papers and specific case studies. Understanding the nature of production and innovation in non-metropolitan contexts closes this volume. Finally, though focused on India, this research raises larger questions with regard to the study of urbanisation and development worldwide.
