In 2005, starving members of the Bhuiya clan in one of Bihar’s poorest villages dug up a long-buried dead goat, cooked and ate it. Sixteen people died within days, twelve of them children.
Bengali-speaking Muslims who had moved to Rajasthan from West Bengal in the 1970s and ’80s were summarily declared Bangladeshi terrorists in the aftermath of the 2008 Jaipur bomb blasts. They remain stateless in their own country.
Landless Lodhas, members of an erstwhile ‘Criminal Tribe’ in Bihar, grapple even today with centuries of shame and dispossession.
These stories—along with those of women with mental and physical disabilities in rural areas, homeless men living in Yamuna Pushta, inNew Delhi, and patients in a leprosy colony in Orissa—reveal both stigma and support, harsh lives, an uncaring, corrupt state and moments of resilience.
Drawn from interviews and conversations as part of a study on destitution by the Centre for Equity Studies, Dispossessed: Stories from India’s Margins takes a wide-ranging view of what it means to be destitute, displaced and marginalized in contemporary India. Equally importantly, through these personal accounts of their research, the authors explore their own privileges in comparison.
Written with sensitivity and care, this is an important book that perceptively questions India’s engagement with the people at its margins and should be essential reading for all.
The book analyses notions of religion and secularity in Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Morocco to identify parallels and contrasts with Charles Taylor’s grand narrative, A Secular Age, written for the North Atlantic world. A key finding is that, enhanced by post-colonial and post-imperial legacies, the state in all eleven cases highly determines religious experience, by variably regulating religious belief, practice, property, education, and/or law. Taylor’s core condition of secularity, namely legal permissibility and social acceptance of open religious unbelief (Secularity III), is largely absent in these societies. The areas affected by state regulation, however, differ greatly. While in India, Israel and most Muslim countries, questions of religious law are central to state regulation, in China it is religious education and organization, and in Russia church property and public practice that bear the brunt. These differences can best be captured, it is suggested, by the concept of “differential burdening.”
Former Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran has had a ringside view of the most critical events and shifts in Indian foreign policy in the new millennium, including the epochal India-US nuclear deal. In this magisterial book, Saran discerns the threads that tie together his experiences as a diplomat.
Using the prism of Kautilya’s Arthashastra and other ancient treatises on statecraft, Saran shows the historical sources of India’s worldview. He looks at India’s neighbourhood and the changing wider world through this lens and arrives at fascinating conclusions – the claims that the world is hurtling towards Chinese unipolarity are overblown; international borders are becoming irrelevant as climate change and cyber terror bypass them; and India shouldn’t hold its breath for a resolution to its border disputes with China and Pakistan in the foreseeable future.
This book also takes the reader behind the closed doors of the most nail-biting negotiations and top-level interactions – from Barack Obama popping by a tense developing country strategy meeting at the Copenhagen climate change summit to the private celebratory dinner thrown by then US President George W. Bush for then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the success of the nuclear deal.
Regulation of water is of immense importance because water is central to every aspect of life. This includes provision of sufficient and safe basic water to every person, something that is not yet fully achieved. Water is also central to livelihoods, particularly agriculture, which remains by far the primary sector in terms of individual livelihoods. Simultaneously, it needs to be regulated in a manner that privileges its protection and preservation in both the short and long term, to ensure the sustainability of human uses. This represents an immense challenge in a context where water regulation has been largely conceived around either the predominance of the state as the actor controlling all water for ‘public purposes’, or of individual landowners having unrestrained control over groundwater found under their land, including at the cost of similar use by other landowners.
First published in 2011, Water Law in India is the only book to offer a comprehensive survey of the legal instruments concerning water in India. It presents a variety of national and state-level instruments that make up the complex and diverse field of water law and policy. This book fills a critical gap in the study of water law, providing a rich reference point for the entire gamut of legal mechanisms available in India.
This edition has been extensively revised to include new chapters on international legal instruments; new instruments on water regulation, including the draft National Water Framework Bill, 2016, and the Model Groundwater (Sustainable Management) Act, 2016; and new water-related instruments in such varied fields as criminal law, land acquisition law, and rural employment legislation. Chapters on drinking water supply, environmental dimensions of water conservation, water infrastructure for irrigation and flood control, groundwater regulation, and institutions catering to water have been thoroughly updated for a more complete coverage of water law.
This edited volume, emerging from a conference on the same theme at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013, examines the nature and character of Indian innovation. The narrative unfolding through the chapters here goes to demonstrate that far from being a monolith, Indian innovation is a vibrant canvas where brush-strokes from all kinds of artists – big businesses, startups, not-for-profits, and State actors – leave distinct impressions. The incentives to innovate are therefore highly contextual in India, with frameworks developed in the Western context such as Schumpeterian innovation doing disservice to the multifarious canvas. This then raises the challenge of building up an innovation ecosystem as the widely divergent interests of each of these actors often collide and conflict, complicating the policy and decisional matrix. This volume explores pathways to inductively construct the idea of Indian innovation, frame consistent policies, resolve stakeholder conflicts, and make her a pioneer in the age of innovation.
The monograph presents a political ecology analysis of interstate water disputes in India to explain why the disputes emerge and recur. It marks a distinct departure from the conventional and distanced constructions that often produce territorialist and legalist narratives. In contrast, the monograph offers a functional and relational account from within, an “anti-geopolitical view”, to describe how inequities and asymmetries are historically and geographically produced – which in turn form the basis for disputes to emerge and escalate.
It uses historical analysis of the Krishna river water dispute to make the following central argument. Interstate water disputes in India are a making of a set of legal ambiguities, political antagonisms and, physical and power asymmetries – rendering them perennial sites of disputation. In India’s multiparty federal democracy context, it translates into a ‘nexus’ between politics of water and mainstream democratic politics, with the disputes becoming popular avenues for political mobilization.
This political ecology of disputes offers other insights of policy relevance as well, calling for solutions beyond legal instruments for effective resolution of disputes. This involves a broader shift, from disputes resolution to creating an ecosystem of interstate cooperation for better transboundary river water governance.
State food provisioning in India had been regarded as an instrument of social policy since independence. In 2001, however, following a series of starvation deaths in several states, a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court served as the catalyst for extensive debates regarding the recognition of the right to food as a basic right in India.
This process resulted in the passage of the National Food Security Act in 2013. The Right to Food Debates lays out the principal arguments offered in the years leading up to the final act by academics, policymakers and government officials, and prominent civil society groups such as the Right to Food Campaign.
Each chapter in the volume concerns a major debate relevant to the food security bill. They also include extensive discussions of the draft bill formulated in 2011 by the National Advisory Council, a body of experts that advised the then government on social policies and the rights of disadvantaged groups.
A rigorous presentation on debates surrounding whether and how to legislate access to food, this volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers in development studies, NGOs, and research organisations in India and other developing countries.
There is a paradigm shift in India’s politics. With his clean reputation, proven track record as chief minister of Gujarat and formidable leadership qualities on display, Narendra Modi seemed the right fit for the prime minister’s job, and just the man to turn the country around after the decade-long UPA rule by the modest and tongue-tied Manmohan Singh. Prime Minister Modi’s first term, however, raises troubling questions. How has his strongman persona and social background impacted policymaking? Has Modi delivered on the high expectations to advance India’s national interest and security? Has the country’s role in the region, in Asia and the world changed, become more meaningful? What has been the effect of Modi’s India First foreign policy on neighbours, and with respect to raising India’s stock in the world and showing the Indian military has teeth? Especially with regard to the US, Russia and China.
Analysing Prime Minister Modi’s foreign and military policies in the context of India’s evolving socio-political and economic milieu, global power politics featuring other strongmen-alpha male leaders (Trump, Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Shinzo Abe), and of Modi’s persona and style of governance, this book offers a critical perspective that helps explain why India has not progressed much towards becoming a consequential power. Argumentative and thought-provoking, Staggering Forward is a must-read to understand India’s foreign and national security policies since 2014.
Despite several decades of reform, India’s electricity sector remains marked by the twin problems of financial indebtedness and inability to provide universal, high quality electricity for all. Although political obstacles to reform are frequently invoked in electricity policy debates, Mapping Power provides the first thorough analysis of the political economy of electricity in Indian states. Through narratives of the electricity sectors in fifteen major states, this book argues that a historically-rooted political economy analysis provides the most useful means to understand the past and identify reforms for the future. The book begins with an analytic framework to understand how the political economy of power both shapes and is shaped by a given state’s larger political economy. The book concludes with a synthetic account of the political economy of electricity that is animated by insights from the state-level empirical materials. The volume shows that attempts to depoliticize the sector are misplaced. Instead, successful reform efforts should aim at a positive dynamic between electricity reform and electoral success.
Indian party politics, commonly viewed as chaotic, clientelistic, and corrupt, is nevertheless a model for deepening democracy and accommodating diversity. Historically, though, observers have argued that Indian politics is non-ideological in nature. In contrast, Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma contend that the Western European paradigm of “ideology” is not applicable to many contemporary multiethnic countries. Using survey data from the Indian National Election Studies and evidence from the Constituent Assembly debates, they show In more diverse states such as India, the most important ideological debates center on statism – the extent to which the state should dominate and regulate society- and recognition- whether and how the state should accommodate various marginalized groups and protect minority rights from majorities.
