John Gray argues that the doctrine of value pluralism poses a serious challenge for liberalisms of the Rawlsian and Millian kind. The only proper political doctrine that is compatible with value pluralism is amodus vivendi that can take various forms. But in truth, value pluralism does little to diminish the appeal of liberalism. Under modern conditions, any half‐decent modus vivendi will look more like liberalism than Gray supposes.
Archives: Journal Articles
Partners in Empowerment: NGOs and Government in the Maharashtra Rural Credit Project
The purpose of the study is to assess the nature of collaboration between non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the government in the Maharashtra Rural Credit Project, with particular emphasis on the role of NGOs in targeting and empowering the rural poor, especially women.. The study situates the impact and comparative advantage of NGOs within the process of interaction in MRCP between NGOs, Government and IFAD.
Partial Publics. The Political Promise of Traditional Medicine in Africa
This essay examines how the publics of public health and those of public domain are reshaping one another in efforts to commercialize and manage modern traditional medicine in Tanzanian universities, government laboratories, nongovernmental clinics, and ministry offices. I argue that struggles over the practices that constitute the public to which contemporary traditional medicine will appeal are also struggles over who is obliged to respond to pain and debility, to mediate the consequences of misfortune, and to take responsibility for the inequalities that shape health and well-being. Post independence and socialist dreams had cast traditional medicine as the basis of an indigenous pharmaceutical industry and promised freedom from multinational pharmaceutical companies and global capitalism more broadly. By generating new publics, current scientific efforts to exploit the therapeutic and commercial value of therapeutic plants are experimenting with political and social philosophies, with biological efficacy, and with new forms of wealth and property. The uneven, contradictory, and partial projections of the public at play in these efforts are raising thorny questions about the forms of sovereignty that are possible within the neoliberal restructuring.
Out-of-School Children: Some Insights on What We Know and What We Do Not
The figures for out-of-school children put out by various official sources in India show wide variations. The problems lie not just in the definitions but also in methods of estimation. A glaring lacuna in this process is that sporadic or irregular attendance is not taken into account when estimating the number. This paper unpacks the phenomenon through an intensive micro-study of enrolment and attendance of all children in a single panchayat in India. It shows that irregular attendance accounts for a much larger proportion of out-of-school children, with wide variation in attendance across social groups. It also conducts a regression analysis to analyse school and household-level factors that affect student attendance. It finds that school-level factors play a much larger role in determining student attendance.
Operationalising an equity reference framework in the climate change regime: Legal and technical perspectives
This paper identifies legal, architectural and technical options for operationalising the equity reference framework (ERF). This framework is increasingly being proposed as a means to address the imperatives of effectiveness and equity in the 2015 agreement.
Only ‘Good People’, Please: Residential Segregation in Urbanising India
One-Rank-One-Pension Logjam: Is There a Way Out?
The continuing stand off between the government and retired soldiers over One-Rank-One-Pension has engendered distrust between the civilian bureaucracy and the military. While the ex-servicemen have been rigid on all their demands, including ones that defy sound reasoning, the manner in which the bureaucracy continues to quibble on minor issues grates on the military’s sense of honour and dignity.
On the Quest for Pakistan
Debates about Pakistan’s creation have the distinct air of conducting an autopsy—the causes for its decline are also implicitly sought while locating the reasons behind its creation. In a sense, this is what Venkat Dhulipala recognises in Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India. Much of the literature on the partition is premised on the argument that subsequent weaknesses in Pakistan’s polity could somehow be predicted because of the ;diverging ideological arguments in support of the Pakistan movement.Arguing the reverse, Dhulipala suggests that the faults in Pakistan’s political structures are not that it was “insufficiently imagined,” or inadequately prepared for, but rather, the consequence of a vision which had, in fact, been imagined in great detail at the time of its creation. Dhulipala argues that the ambiguities confronting the nature of the Pakistan state or the clashes between its institutions were not shaped by the unanticipated consequences of the derailment of the Pakistan dream at all: this was precisely what the Muslim League was struggling for, since at least the 1920s.
On the Importance of Triangulating Data Sets to Examine Indians on the Move
A chapter dedicated to migration in the Economic Survey 2016–17 signals the willingness on the part of Indian policymakers to address the linkages between migration, labour markets, and economic development. This paper attempts to take forward this discussion. We comment on the salient mobility trends in India gleaned from existing data sets, and then compare and critique estimates of the Economic Survey with traditional data sets. After highlighting the data and resultant knowledge gaps, the article comments on the possibility of using innovative data sources and methods to understand migration and human mobility. It also offers ideas on how an enhanced understanding of mobility is important for policy interventions for those individuals who change locations permanently and those who move seasonally.
Of Rasoi ka Kaam/Bathroom ka Kaam: Perspectives of Women Domestic Workers
Practices of purity and pollution have been a critical area of inquiry in paid domestic work relations in India. This paper revisits the idea of purity and pollution in the space of the home in paid domestic work, but with the intent to turn the gaze around. It shifts the focus by looking at workers as the subjects and examining their responses. It argues that the existing frameworks for looking at the space of home and the practices of purity and pollution are limiting and have to be revisited to develop a dynamic understanding of the everyday reality of domestic work and caste hierarchies at work.