Archives: Journal Articles

The Municipal Corporations and State government of Delhi have been at loggerheads on issues of financial, structural and functional domain of the former. This article explores the financial tussle between the two governance entities to argue for reforms in urban finance structures (Municipal Valuation Committee and Property Tax) for better service delivery across all corporations of the city.

THE recent furore in the Indian Parliament over the alleged tapping of telephones was something of a missed opportunity. The debate unerringly focused on the periphery of the problem, leaving aside questions of vital importance. Political leaders across the spectrum were visibly agitated over the possible interception of their telephonic conversations. The Indian government assured them that no such tapping had been authorized, and there the matter rests. But from information available in the public domain, it is evident that electronic eaves-dropping did take place. Even if unintended, it raises the disturbing possibility that the intelligence agencies are operating at and probably pushing the bounds of legitimacy and accountability.

This sits uneasily with the central precept of democratic theory and practice: securing and maintaining public consent for activities of the state. Alongside the military, intelligence agencies play a critical role in protecting national security. Very like the military, they also raise the ticklish question of how to guard ourselves against the guardians. The agencies’ control of sensitive information, their institutional identity shrouded in secrecy, their professional expertise in surveillance and covert operations: all are essential to their functioning, but could also erode the practice of democratic governance, and the rights and liberties of the people. Political control of intelligence is an important challenge for ‘mature’ as well emerging democracies.

In the context of the ongoing debate on land acquisition in India and its relationship to development, this article presents an in-depth investigation of the characteristics of special economic zones (SEZs) in India. This includes the nature of exports and economic activity, their use of land and their location. It finds that a large majority of the SEZs are less than 1 sq. km, their exports focused on the information technology/information-technology-enabled service (IT/ITES) sector and refined petroleum, and located in a limited number of relatively advanced districts in a few states. Further, it is not the new SEZs, but the seven erstwhile EPZs and the 12 SEZs established between 2000 and 2005, which account for 90 per cent of the manufacturing exports from SEZs. Crucially, SEZs occupying 3 per cent of the land are responsible for 81 per cent of the total non-petroleum exports from SEZs. The nature of governance in these SEZs, which are also often seen as incipient urban settlements, is tenuous and non-representative. The article concludes with a discussion on the nexus of land, development and urbanization. It argues that the resistance to land acquisition is related to both acquisition processes and the relative costs and benefits of recent development initiatives, of which SEZs are an integral part.

Using ward-level data released by the census, the paper carries out a study of residential segregation in the 10 most populated Indian cities. It finds that there is significant residential segregation by caste and also by access to in-house drinking water, a basic public good, and access to in-house latrines, a basic private good. Further, in the case of some cities covered in the study, the proportion of Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes in wards is highly correlated with access to public, private, and luxury goods.

Conflicts have a variety of causes: political, cultural, social or economic. But the form in which conflicts express themselves are almost always the work of politics. The potential causes of conflict do not tell us about the forms of mediation through which conflict is expressed: the forms in which it will be ideologically articulated or articulated at all, the methods it will deploy, the bottom lines that will mark it, the passions it will generate, the character of leadership it will throw up. In this sense, the expression of conflict is contingent. It is the work of political agency, not over-determined structural causes.

The following will offer a series of reflections on different types of conflict in India. It will focus less on providing solutions than on articulating what might be called “wicked problems” in conflict resolution. These problems turn out to be wicked in two senses. They are wicked in the sense of being difficult to deal with, but also wicked in the sense that they exemplify Polubiyus’ definition of a wicked problem: where you can neither endure a condition of conflict, nor the means to overcome it.

In these polarized times, if there is one thing that most Indian’s will agree on, it is that the Indian state suffers from a serious crisis of implementation capacity. Weak implementation capacity is the reason why the Indian state is unable to deliver quality public services to its citizens, even when its politicians promise ‘maximum governance’, and India’s unruly, demotivated, corrupt frontline bureaucrats are the primary culprit.

POLITICAL control of the military is seldom considered problematic in the Indian context. The country is routinely lauded for being one of the few post-colonial states where the military has not intervened in political issues. As a recent assessment puts it, ‘India is among only a handful of nations in which civilian administrations wield so much power over the military.’ Another important study claims that, ‘The Indian military, despite growth in its geostrategic importance, increased technological and organizational sophistication and use in internal security operations, stands firmly subordinate to civilian leaders of all parties and ideologies.’

Such appraisals, however, tend to overlook the one area where civil-military relations are usually fraught – the potential or actual use of force. Strategy is the creative element in the exercise of power. It is the search for an optimum relationship between available military means and desired political ends. Strategy, then, is the key domain of civil-military interaction. It is the area where theoretical notions of civilian supremacy and military subordination can be tested most closely in practice. It is surprising, therefore, that most discussions of civil-military relations in India blissfully bypass the terrain of strategy.

This essay suggests that the conventional wisdom on civil-military relations in India needs substantial qualification. Whilst the military has not intruded in the formal machinery of politics, it is an important and influential player in certain areas of policy. It has managed to do so by an expansive definition of what constitutes its domain of ‘operational expertise’ and by insisting that the politicians stay clear of its operational turf. Its ability to do so has been supported by a skewed narrative of civil-military interaction in past conflicts – one that remains influential well beyond military circles. In order to understand this neglected dimension of civil-military relations we need to range back in time.

In establishing the norm of civilian supremacy in the republic, Jawaharlal Nehru played a key role. Even before he took control of the levers of state power, Nehru realized the importance of keeping the military subordinate to the political authority. Nehru’s views were shaped by his understanding of the pernicious effects of militarism in Europe and Japan. From the outset, therefore, he took special care in ensuring proper relations between the civilians and the military. At the eve of independence, the army commander-in-chief had issued orders to keep the public away from the flag hoisting ceremony. Rescinding this order, Nehru wrote to General Rob Lockhart: ‘In any policy that is to be pursued in the army or otherwise, the views of the Government of India and the policy they lay down must prevail. If any person is unable to lay down that policy he has no place in the Indian Army.’

Global urbanization is leading to an inexorable spread of several major diseases that need to be stemmed. Dengue is one of these major diseases spreading in cities today, with its principal mosquito vector superbly adapted to the urban environment. Current mosquito control strategies are proving inadequate, especially in the face of such urbanisation and novel, evidence-based targeted approaches are needed. Through combined epidemiological and entomological approaches, we aimed to identify a novel sanitation strategy to alleviate the burden of dengue through how the dengue virus spreads through the community. We combined surveillance case mapping, prospective serological studies, year-round mosquito surveys, socio-economic and Knowledge Attitudes and Practices surveys across Delhi. We identified lack of access to tap water (≤98%) as an important risk factor for dengue virus IgG sero-positivity (adjusted Odds Ratio 4.69, 95% C.I. 2.06–10.67) and not poverty per se. Wealthier districts had a higher dengue burden despite lower mosquito densities than the Intermediary income communities (adjusted Odds Ratio 2.92, 95% C.I. 1.26–6.72). This probably reflects dengue being introduced by people travelling from poorer areas to work in wealthier houses. These poorer, high density areas, where temperatures are also warmer, also had dengue cases during the winter. Control strategies based on improved access to a reliable supply of tap water plus focal intervention in intra-urban heat islands prior to the dengue season could not only lead to a reduction in mosquito abundance but also eliminate the reservoir of dengue virus clearly circulating at low levels in winter in socio-economically disadvantaged areas.

While the Modi regime in India shares many exclusionary features in common with authoritarian populists elsewhere, one distinguishing feature is its umbilical relationship to the semi-fascist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose long-term goal has been the establishment of a Hindu rashtra (nation). One of the major instruments for achieving this has been education, with the RSS seeing cultural hegemony as more foundational than political control. This article examines the transformation of school and higher education under the Modi regime in an effort to bring India more in line with the Hindu nationalist vision of its parent body, and the degree to which being in government supports or creates contradictions with the RSS vision.

The introduction of skilling programmes in government schools from the secondary level itself—as part of the Indian government’s ambition to make India the “Skill Capital of the World”—will restrict young people, largely from socially underprivileged backgrounds, to low-productivity blue-collar employment in the informal sector. What is needed is not truncated education in the form of vocational training, but quality basic education for all, which will enable young people to compete for employment in the formal economy.