Journal Articles

A ‘Mainstreaming’ Approach to Uplifting Migrant Households

The Covid 19 migrant crisis could be seen as a watershed moment for policy in the realm of internal migration. Despite the lack of an omnibus migration policy, several disparate policy initiatives emerged at multiple levels of government, across various sectors leveraging multi-stakeholder collab...

Shock Mobilities During Moments of Acute Uncertainty

The COVID-19 pandemic and interventions addressing it raise important questions about human mobility that have geopolitical implications. This forum uses mobility and immobility during the pandemic as lenses onto the ways that routinised state power reacts to acute uncertainties, as well as how t...

The Message from Agnipath: India Can’t Afford the Military it Needs

The signals that the Agnipath scheme sends to India’s adversaries is that under the current dispensation India is unable to provide for the armed forces what the country needs to meet its strategic aims.

The Regulation of Planetary Health Challenges: A Co-Benefits Approa...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) represents a global public health challenge. It has been examined through various angles, but the link between AMR and access to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) or lack thereof has received little attention. Both AMR and WASH relate directly to the realization ...

Experimenting with Urban–Rural Partnerships for Sustainable Sanitat...

Local government partnerships for producing services are ubiquitous in many countries. However, the approach has rarely been applied in India—likely owing to a history of centralized planning and independent urban and rural governance systems. Nonetheless, the country’s transforming sanitation la...

Testing the Waters: Young Women’s Work and Mobile Aspirations in In...

While metropolitan cities are framed as emancipatory spaces for women migrants, we know less about their experiences in smaller cities, which are driving urban transformation in India. Drawing on pre-pandemic fieldwork with employed youth (aged 15–29 years) in Mangalore and Kishangarh, this artic...

Governing Water to Foster Equity and Conservation

The water sector in India and vested interests in it have always been averse to change. We have now reached a point where diffi cult decisions must be taken if we are to avoid an increasing number of water-related confl icts. The states must not only adopt legislation based on the central governm...

Religion-as-Ethnicity and the Emerging Hindu Vote in India

Religious division formed the basis for the subcontinent’s partition and has continued to be a major social cleavage in local relations. Yet remarkably religious parties have rarely been successful in India. This may be changing with an ascendant Bharatiya Janata Party mobilizing the Hindu vote. ...

The Decentered Construction of Global Rights: Lessons from the Huma...

Families in Flint, Michigan, protesting lead in their water, indigenous groups in the Amazon asserting control over their rivers, slum dwellers in India worried about disconnection or demanding cities bring potable water to their neighborhoods, an entire city in South Africa worried about the day...

Methods and Lessons From Costing a Large mHealth Intervention at Sc...

The use of mobile devices to deliver public health interventions is rapidly increasing, particularly in low resource settings. Despite their proliferation, several mHealth interventions in developing countries fail to reach geographical scale, and long-term sustainability for most remains uncerta...

Evaluating India’s New Anti-conversion Laws

Religious conversions, especially with allegations of force involved, have continued to be an issue of concern among Indian state administrations since pre-independence. Following the Constitution of India coming into force, a specific right under Article 25 of the Constitution provided all perso...

Understanding Policy Focus on Child Protection

The problem

AS of late 2021, India counted the largest absolute number of women elected to political office of all countries in the world. India also has one of the world’s highest proportions of political offices currently held by women. The histories of Indian women as political leaders complement these ra...

From a gungi gudiya to an autocrat

THE last year saw the release of six mainstream Bollywood films and web series, portraying female politicians either as protagonists or in key roles, these include Madam Chief Minister, Thalaivi, Bellbottom, Maharani, Tandav and Family Man. All of them were widely popular for having either a larg...

Women’s participation in Indian national elections

MUCH has already been written about women’s representation in Indian national politics.1 In this article, we add to existing contributions by examining recent data from India’s 2019 general elections and use that data to identify changes and continuities in various aspects of women’s participatio...

Dichotomy to Continuum: Importance of Faecal Sludge Management in S...

Meeting the sanitation needs of a growing and urbanizing population in India led the incumbent national government to launch a large-scale sanitation programme, the Swachh Bharat Mission in 2014. Having reduced the deficit in basic rural sanitation in its first phase, the programme is targeting t...

Confronting inequality beyond sustainable development: The case for...

The development model emphasizing economic growth has been at the root of today's environmental crises. Its reshaping as ‘sustainable’ development was supposed to address its shortcomings while giving particular attention to the needs of the poor. This has largely failed and in the process inequa...

Addressing Housing Shortage Among Urban Poor Through BLC: Learnings...

Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY-Urban) was launched in 2015 to address the housing requirements of the urban poor, having four verticals to channel its subsidies. Among them, Beneficiary- Led Individual House Construction (BLC) has emerged as the most successful, with a large proportion of housi...