Suchergebnisse

Increasing rates of school enrolment have changed childhoods in the global South, so that it is now the norm for children to attend at least some years of primary school. This paper explores the extent to which valuing of children as educational projects and outcomes may be displacing previous valuations of children as contributors to the domestic economy. The paper draws on qualitative interview data from Young Lives, a longitudinal study of children growing up in four developing countries, using a case study approach to explore the experiences of four children in rural Andhra Pradesh, India. The paper suggests that children are balancing expectations for the future with responsibilities to their families in the present, and concludes that the over‐valuing of formal qualifications and the under‐valuing of forms of work such as agriculture risk being internalised by children, leaving those who do not succeed feeling they are 'a waste'.

The perception that communities are passive recipients of innovations has long been rejected. The way communities respond to any innovation is the result of unique and complex negotiations and renegotiations between their culture and the innovations. These responses can cause changes in the existing elements of the culture and lead to the emergence of new elements that act as feedback into the initial process. It is from this perspective that this article aims to understand the introduction and expansion of horticulture among the Savara of Seethampeta Mandal, Andhra Pradesh. The interplay of the Savara culture and horticulture is grounded on certain Savara institutions and their responses to the innovation of horticulture, creating a loop where positive responses from the earlier culture feed into new elements of culture that are positively oriented towards horticulture. Using ethnographic data based on fieldwork, this article seeks to understand how the earlier and emergent Savara cultures have facilitated the widespread adoption of horticulture in the area under study.

The main objective of the paper is to estimate the costs of groundwater over exploitation and examine the costs and benefits from groundwater replenishing mechanisms in different ecological contexts. Using the public good and externalities framework, the study shows how groundwater exploitation in Andhra Pradesh, India is resulting in economic losses to individual farmers apart from ecological degradation. It is argued that policies towards strengthening the resource base (replenishment mechanisms) and equitable distribution of the resource (property rights) would be beneficial, economically as well as ecologically.The analysis is in favour of investment in replenishment mechanisms such as irrigation tanks and percolation tanks. The situation of over extraction and the resultant environmental degradation is a consequence of lack of appropriate and adequate policies (policy failure) for managing the subsurface water resources. Hitherto, groundwater policies (subsidized credit, power, etc.) are in the nature of encouraging private initiatives in groundwater development. It is argued that community-based investments in replenishment as well as extraction of groundwater would make better economic as well as ecological sense.

In 1991, women from Dubagunta, Nellore District in the state of Andhra Pradesh forced the liquor traders to leave the area. This incident is believed to have been the origin of the Anti-Liquor Movement, which finally led to alcoholic beverages being prohibited in the state. The main participants in the early struggle were unprivileged, rural low-caste women. They were supported by voluntary organisations and later by politicians from the opposition parties. The study presents an analysis of the process whereby the political and private endeavours of individuals were integrated into a broader social movement. It discusses discourses on gender and household relations in rural Andhra Pradesh and the involvement of urban activists as organisers, leaders and translators of the struggle. The attention is on how politicians, representatives of the state administration, and liquor traders either sided with the temperance movement or worked against it, and on the blurred boundary between 'friend' and 'foe'. It demonstrates how the media coverage and the gathering of participants in collective activities - such as demonstrations, meetings, sit-ins, and protest travelling - were vital for the formation of an 'imagined community' of protest. The Anti-Liquor Movement of Andhra Pradesh is shaped by global processes. The Indian economy opened up to global market forces in the 1980s and at the same time local activists became involved in transnational debates on feminism, Gandhianism, and Marxism. Even so, as the study reveals, the movement as such was mainly confined to Andhra Pradesh.