The Centre for Policy Research is hosting a talk by
Sunila S. Kale
Assistant Professor, Jackson School of International Studies
University of Washington
on
Electrifying India: Regional Political Economies of Development
Date: Monday, 8 April 2013
Time: 4:00 – 5:30 pm
Electrifying India: Regional Political Economies of Development
Abstract:
Electricity is a quintessential piece of the modern infrastructural state as well as a key feature of how Indian development and modernity have been imagined and enacted. Analyzing electricity, a concurrent subject in which the state governments have played a large role, is also useful to challenge the common view of Indian political economy as historically dominated by the central government. Despite the inordinate authority of the central Indian state to guide the country’s development agenda, India’s state governments have used their command of critical domains of social and physical architecture—such as electricity—to pursue distinct trajectories of development. In those parts of the countryside that were successfully electrified from the 1960s to the 1980s, the gains were due to neither nationalist idealism nor merely technocratic plans. Instead, rural electrification occurred where rural constituencies became politically influential within state political regimes. One result of this variation in state-level development paths is that in spite of the vast sums devoted to electrification from independence onwards, today access to electricity varies widely from state to state within India. The process of electrification also provides a unique lens with which to think about the politico-economic connections across two time periods that are usually treated as distinct: the era of central planning until the 1980s, and the period of market reforms that has followed. The development pathways charted in the earlier period have shaped the kinds of policies pursued in the last two decades.
Speaker’s Biography:
Sunila S. Kale is an Assistant Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, where her teaching and research focus on Indian and South Asian politics as well as the political economy of development. She has a book forthcoming from Stanford University Press titled Electrifying India: Regional Political Economies of Development. The manuscript was just awarded the 2013 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences by the American Institute of Indian Studies.
