Defying the Odds is about the new Dalit identity. It profiles the phenomenal rise of twenty Dalit entrepreneurs, the few who through a combination of grit, ambition, drive and hustle and some luck – have managed to break through social, economic and practical barriers. It illustrates instances where adversity compensated for disadvantage, where working their way up from the bottom instilled in Dalit entrepreneurs a much greater resilience as well as a willingness to seize opportunities in sectors and locations eschewed by more privileged business groups.
Traditional Dalit narratives are marked by struggle for identity, rights, equality and for inclusion. These inspiring stories capture both the difficulty of their circumstances as well as their extraordinary steadfastness, while bringing light to the possibilities of entrepreneurship as a tool of social empowerment.
Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad—five of the largest Indian megacities—are the economic and commercial engines for modern India. These metropolitan regions serve as magnets of migration, resulting in explosive growth of the core cities and their urban agglomerations. Yet arrangements for governance of these metropolitan regions are fractured and sterile.
Based on extensive comparative data on demographics, economy, infrastructure, society, environment, political character, and institutions for governance, this book introduces megacities in the Indian context and explains how urbanization has rarely been at the core of the Indian planning regime.
The book is driven by the conviction that in the current era of globalization, India urgently needs a political vision for the role of its metropolitan regions, as it is projected that the largest number of people will be added to the urban areas. It emphasizes the need for proper regional planning instead of an amorphous collection of municipalities, and an appropriate, politically mandated governance setup.
The book is a collection of Rajiv Kumar’s widely read columns in some of India’s leading newspapers over the last two years. The volume includes an introduction that provides a sharp and candid insight into multiple policy failures of the UPA II government and lays out the reform agenda for the incoming BJP government. The articles provide an incisive analysis of India’s turbulent economic journey over the last three years as the country lost both its policy direction and economic momentum. The short essays provide a rare ringside view of policymaking and all its frailties.
The political understanding to set aside the border dispute and explore functional areas of cooperation has undoubtedly set the tone for an expanding arc of cooperation between India and China at bilateral, regional and international levels. While these have created new avenues of engagement, the India-China borderlands have largely remained in a freeze frame, awaiting a new political imagination. Breaking out of this time warp would call for a redefinition of the problem beyond conflict prevention towards conflict transformation. This will mean appreciating that there is more to borders than lines of control, hotlines and flag meetings. The book offers a critical comparative analysis of India-China relations at the subregional level, an analytical level that remains an understudied aspect in both research and policy. The study situates their evolving dynamics within the rubric of the massive state-led developmental thrust that India’s Northeast and China’s Western border regions are currently witnessing. By and large, India and China’s parallel moves in the subregion have tended to be studied as isolated cases with little attempt at comparison. This has been a curious omission at a time when processes of subregional integration are rescaling India and China and call for the need to disaggregate our understanding beyond solely national frames of reference. If creatively reimagined, the India-China borderlands could be at the centre of a promising subregional conversation of change. This will in turn depend on India and China’s capacity to recast ageing agendas and to imaginatively decentre practices of governance and diplomacy. This could introduce a much-needed borderlands perspective as an analytical category in its own right, instead of remaining as a mere tangential dimension of India-China relations.
Following the end of the Cold War, the economic reforms in the early 1990s, and ensuing impressive growth rates, India has emerged as a leading voice in global affairs, particularly on international economic issues. Its domestic market is fast-growing and India is becoming increasingly important to global geo-strategic calculations, at a time when it has been outperforming many other growing economies, and is the only Asian country with the heft to counterbalance China. Indeed, so much is India defined internationally by its economic performance (and challenges) that other dimensions of its internal situation, notably relevant to security, and of its foreign policy have been relatively neglected in the existing literature.
This handbook presents an innovative, high profile volume, providing an authoritative and accessible examination and critique of Indian foreign policy. The handbook brings together essays from a global team of leading experts in the field to provide a comprehensive study of the various dimensions of Indian foreign policy.
This volume addresses these and other relevant questions that lie at the heart of delimitation of electoral boundaries and have important implications for political representation. Written by some of the leading specialists and experts on the subject of delimitation, the essays discuss how the exercise of delimitation of electoral constituencies is as integral to political representation as political representation is to democracy.
Far from being a techno-bureaucratic exercise, apportioning electoral divisions involves philosophical, political, legal, and practical implications. The essays explain how the process of drawing and redrawing of lines on the electoral map involves contending interests of political parties, of individual politicians, and of spatially and culturally embedded groups.
Since the economic liberalization of the early 1990s, India has been, on several occasions and at different forums, feted as a great power. This subject has been discussed in numerous books, but mostly in terms of rapid economic growth and immense potential in the emerging market. There is also a vast collection of literature on India’s ‘soft power’—culture, tourism, frugal engineering, and knowledge economy. However, there has been no serious exploration of the alternative path India can take to achieving great power status—a combination of hard power, geostrategics, and realpolitik.
In this book, Bharat Karnad delves exclusively into these hard power aspects of India’s rise and the problems associated with them. He offers an incisive analysis of the deficits in the country’s military capabilities and in the ‘software’ related to hard power—absence of political vision and will, insensitivity to strategic geography, and unimaginative foreign and military policies—and arrives at powerful arguments on why these shortfalls have prevented the country from achieving the great power status.
For the longest time, sanitation received little attention from policymakers and lawyers, although it was not completely outside the purview of laws and policies in India. However, the past couple of decades have witnessed a significant change in the manner in which sanitation is viewed, both at the national and international levels. While this change is accompanied by a growing interest among academics and practitioners in the policy perspectives on sanitation, the emphasis on its legal dimensions has lagged behind considerably. The piecemeal nature of the existing legal instruments having a bearing on sanitation and the lack of awareness about these instruments has further contributed to this knowledge deficit.
This volume:
Is the most comprehensive work on sanitation law in India
Provides an overview of the existing legal as well as policy instruments related to sanitation in India
Fills the existing gap, both in knowledge and policy instruments, defining sanitation in India
Highlights the importance, complexity, and fragmented nature of the legal and policy frameworks that inform the sanitation sector
Lays special emphasis on the legal dimensions of sanitation in India
Taking India by storm, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been one of the most talked about figures all around the world. His enigmatic persona and his forceful leadership have created a polarized world where some idolize him, while others question his motives and methods. In an attempt to break the myths around who Narendra Modi really is, the author attempts to take us through a journey of the leader’s life, his political aspirations, his growth within the party, his remarkable stint in Gujarat and his performance over the last two years in Delhi. The author identifies the many formidable challenges Modi faces as the leader of the world’s largest democracy that is in the midst of a complex transition and recommends measures that Modi must implement to deliver on his promises, thereby enabling India to realize its true potential.
The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution, co-edited by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and published by the Oxford University Press ‘features contributions from leading legal scholars, political scientists, and judges to present a rounded perspective on the discipline and emerging trends. (It) examines the history, development, and impact of the Indian constitution.
