Archives: Journal Articles

This article discusses the central government policy for drinking water supply in rural areas. It examines its evolution from the 1970s onwards and focuses, in particular, on the reforms of the past decade, looking more specifically at the Swajaldhara Guidelines. These reforms are of capital importance because they seek to completely change the rural drinking water supply policy framework.

Vol. 61 (2018) of the German Yearbook of International Law deals with a variety of topics in the General Articles section. Its Forum section analyses the Donald Trump administration and international law. Its Focus section assembles a selection of articles based upon presentations which were discussed at an international conference on International Law and Human Health convened by Sebastian von Kielmansegg and Nele Matz-Lück, and supported by the Thyssen Foundation, from 26-27 September 2018. The German Practice section analyses, among other topical matters, the activation of the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction over the crime of aggression, German practice concerning the use of force in Syria, and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, adopted in Marrakech, Morocco, in December 2018.

The law and policy frameworks for allocation or reallocation of water to different uses, or within a category of use, remain underdeveloped in India. This paper intends providing a starting point for a conversation on the law and policy dimensions of inter-sectoral water allocation. Focusing on a specific inter-sectoral water allocation conflict in Rajsamand District, Rajasthan, it illustrates gaps in the existing law and policy frameworks and highlights multiple issues that need to be addressed. It argues that the law must go beyond just prioritising water uses and water allocation to understand the issue in a comprehensive manner.

With a view to reduce high levels of maternal and neonatal mortality, the National Rural Health Mission launched the Janani Suraksha Yojana in 2005. This is an innovative conditional cash transfer programme to provide monetary incentives to women to deliver in medical facilities. This study evaluates its functioning by using a unique data set covering eight districts spread across seven “low performing states” in the country. It shows that JSY is working reasonably well, judging by the proportion of women receiving incentives after delivering in a government facility, location of receiving incentives, mode of payments and payment of bribes. But the accredited social health activists, an important component of JSY, play a limited role in facilitating delivery in a medical facility. Importantly, even though the proportion of women delivering in a medical facility has improved considerably, a significant fraction of women continues to deliver at home. These women are more disadvantaged than those who deliver in government facilities.

About half of Delhi’s homeless shelters operate at full capacity to overcrowded conditions, providing less space than the norm of 50 sq.ft. per resident. This is a planning problem since policymakers have treated critical questions of where shelters should be built, how many residents shelters should accommodate, and how much space to allot for each shelter as separate issues at various times, and independent of the actual demographics that the various shelters in different parts of the city cater to. This piece focuses on two neighboring, identically-sized porta-cabin shelters in South Delhi’s Nehru Place, which cater to two different groups of homeless people. It juxtaposes narratives of the two sets of residents with an analysis of the official data to reveal why, over the last eighteen months (March 2019-August 2020), one of them was constantly overcrowded and the other was, by official standards, modestly but consistently utilized.

This paper presents a conceptual account of urban governance in Mumbai as a rent-sharing system based fundamentally on control over urban space. We use rents in the economic sense, of returns that exceed what would be available in a competitive market. Formal rules and policies, which are ‘flexibly’ enforced, form the underlying basis for the generation of rents. Rent creation and sharing is not solely concerned with corruption or patronage. We rather argue that the system is functional for Mumbai—it does work in the organization of economic and social life in the city. This includes areas where no formal market exists, such as the use of pavements for street vending. The system also helps address commitment problems in the multifarious transactions, many of which are informal, that underpin the economy of the city, by providing a measure of stability and predictability in an uncertain legal environment. However, while the system is both resilient and functional, it thwarts prospects for transformative change.

Suggested Citation:

Chattaraj, S, & Walton, M (2017). Functional dysfunction: Mumbai’s political economy of rent sharing. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 33(3), 438-456

The shifting discourses on the purposes, objectives, and forms of India’s environment regulations are discussed within the broader domestic, political, and economic contexts. The environmental law reforms are being designed to legalise and protect financial investments in projects, irrespective of their environmental performance, and to monetise their impacts and damages.

The article looks at British India’s Burma campaign of 1941–45 and asks why the decisive battles of Imphal and Kohima appear to be virtually invisible from India’s national imagination today. It further critiques dominant readings of the twin battles for their failure to accommodate the heterogeneity of experiences and contributions of the hill tribes of the India-Burma borderlands who fought in it. The omission appears even more intriguing given that despite being on the winning side, the border communities end up losing the memory battle. While it questions the conventional notion that memory is the postcolonial state’s prerogative, it also recognizes that counter-memories are by no means monolithic. It makes the case for acknowledging alternative constructions and communities of practice that imaginatively decenter the construction of memory in the borderlands. Without connecting with the lives, and in turn, the memories of the border communities who inhabit the physical sites of the war, the cliché of the “forgotten war” will remain an overused, and ultimately, an offensive trope.

Although it is still too early to predict the full strategic fallout of the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years, triggering an unexpectedly swift collapse of the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF) and the Afghan government and state, its implications are without a doubt, seismic. The withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989, after a 10-year-long intervention, was followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc within two years, the collapse of the Najibullah PDPA government in 1992, and the intra-Mujahideen fighting from 1992-96. That interlude paved the way for the takeover of Afghanistan in 1995-96 by the Taliban == a religious militia raised by Pakistan in the refugee camps and madrasas on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line. It was nominally led by a religious preacher, Mullah Omar, anointed as the ‘Emir-ul-Momineen’ or Commander of the Faithful [with a cloak attributed to Prophet Mohammad (PBUH)]. It led eventually to the allegiance and arrival of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the fateful airborne terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the United States, the US two decades of ‘war on terror’ fought on Afghan soil, and its final almost unconditional and unilateral withdrawal by the end of August, declaring ‘mission accomplished’. By then, ahead of the US withdrawal deadline, the Taliban had on August 15 swarmed into Kabul.