Suchergebnisse

When India was invented as a ""modern"" country in the years after Independence in 1947 it styled itself as a secular, federal, democratic Republic committed to an ideology of development. Nehru's India never quite fulfilled this promise, but more recently his vision of India has been challenged by two ""revolts of the elites"": those of economic liberalization and Hindu nationalism. These revolts have been challenged, in turn, by various movements, including those of India's ""Backward Classes"". These movements have exploited the democratic spaces of India both to challenge for power and to.

Comprising writings ordered around intentional and imminent 'development', this reader offers a compendium of classical and contemporary debates on development: Adam Smith and Karl Marx meet, among others, Robert Wade, Amartya Sen and Jeffrey Sachs

Economic growth in India has failed to reduce extreme income poverty or provide decent jobs as effectively as growth has done in East Asia. Mindful of a political threat from the labouring poor, successive governments have offered India's 'surplus populations' guaranteed work, first through the Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS) and more recently under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). This paper uses ethnographic and large-n datasets to examine how the EAS worked in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh; it also utilizes a preliminary dataset for NREGA in Madhya Pradesh. We show that understandings of the EAS were poor among intended beneficiaries in both states. We also show that the EAS did not work better for the rural poor in Madhya Pradesh than in Bihar, notwithstanding the existence of functioning panchayati Raj institutions in the former. Importantly, this calls into question aspects of a conventional decentralization agenda. Most significantly, the paper suggests that geographies of EAS fund flows illuminate the nature and workings of the local state. Distribution of EAS funds within districts and blocks is most uneven where allocative power is effectively monopolized by a regional political boss and/or is unchallenged by bureaucratic oversight mechanisms. We discuss how far the same problems might affect NREGA schemes notwithstanding the more effective information flows and accountability mechanisms that surround them

This article reviews the current state of the debate around the concept of 'urban bias'. It first reviews Michael Lipton's original formulation of an Urban Bias Thesis (UBT), and the initial debates that took shape in regard to his work and the work of Elliott Berg and Robert Bates. The main body of the article, however, considers a recent reworking of the UBT by Robert Eastwood and Michael Lipton, and four sets of objections that can be raised against it. Central to these objections are new accounts of the importance of mobility in constructing rural-urban livelihoods and claims emanating from the 'new economic geography' about the economic advantages of towns and cities. The article concludes with a short review of the implication of the continuing debate on 'urban bias' for public policy and Poverty Reduction Strategies.

The Eastern India Rainfeld Farming Project is in many respects a model development project. A joint venture of the governments of India and the UK, the EIREP has been successful in improving farm-based livelihood I Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal. But the Project might yet be considered a failure. It has not persuaded the poorest villagers in Jharkhand to join or manage the self-help groups that are called for by the Project's Logical Framework. (InWent/DÜI)