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This paper contributes to the emerging literature on state rescaling by examining how processes of restructuring in late transitioning countries like India shape spaces of collective action for labour. India's subnational States, which have become increasingly critical scales for shaping processes of economic restructuring, face competing governance imperatives. On one hand, they must offer a business-friendly environment, including cheap labour, in order to attract private investments. On the other hand, in a democratic polity, they are compelled to secure political power through electoral appeal to labour. Through a study of labour regimes in the southern State of Tamil Nadu, I argue that subnational governments have responded to this challenge by enabling a scale of labour governance that undermines labour's ability to engage with new spaces of collective action opened up by reforms and globalization. Rather, the State subsidizes labour through welfare provisioning in their residential spaces even as it draws upon inter-State migrant labour that wields less electoral power.

The Dravidian model: an introduction -- Conceptualising power in caste society -- Democratising education -- Democratising care -- Broadening growth and democratising capital -- Transforming rural relations -- Popular interventions and urban labour -- fissures, limits and possible futures.

This book adds to the growing literature on dynamics of regional development in the global South by mapping the politics and processes contributing to the distinct developmental trajectory of Tamil Nadu, southern India. Using a novel interpretive framework and drawing upon fresh data and literature, it seeks to explain the social and economic development of the state in terms of populist mobilization against caste-based inequalities. Dominant policy narratives on inclusive growth assume a sequential logic whereby returns to growth are used to invest in socially inclusive policies. By focusing more on redistribution of access to opportunities in the modern economy, Tamil Nadu has sustained a relatively more inclusive and dynamic growth process. Democratization of economic opportunities has made such broad-based growth possible even as interventions in social sectors reinforce the former. The book thus also speaks to the nascent literature on the relationship between the logic of modernisation and status based inequalities in the global South.

While labour linkages and flows between rural and urban India have been studied, there is little discussion on the implications of the agrarian question of capital for the urban. This is particularly important given the intertwining of caste and capital accumulation in India. If there are caste barriers to entry into accumulation in the urban, what does it mean for pathways of diversification of agrarian capital out of agriculture? In this article, we address this question by comparing the trajectories of capital accumulation in the urban by two agrarian caste groups, the Kongu Vellala Gounders (KVGs) in western Tamil Nadu and the Jats in Haryana. We argue that the dominance of specific caste groups in non-agrarian accumulation erects barriers for transition of agrarian capital into the urban. Such barriers are further aggravated by the increasingly adverse conditions under which capitalist farmers produce in rural India and by new barriers to entry posed by globalising market conditions. Finally, we suggest that differences in subnational politics account for differences in transition pathways between the two agrarian castes. We therefore argue that a caste-based reading is critical to understand how caste intersects with diversification of capital from the rural to the Indian urban.

The enormous potential of ICTs to fundamentally transform the nature of economic growth and development has induced both wide-ranging hopes and apprehensions. While debates on these issues in the context of advanced market economies are relatively old, their significance for low-income economies, like India and China, is only beginning to be appreciated now. This pioneering volume gives a comprehensive overview of the diverse linkages between ICTs and Indian economic development. It provides an excellent analysis of the macro-economic dimensions of these linkages

In 2004, following the election of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), India began to introduce a series of legally enforceable rights to expand the economic security and social opportunities of its citizens. The flagship initiative of the UPA was the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA); a program which sought to protect the livelihoods of the poor agricultural labourers during periods of distress, by granting adult members of every rural household the right to demand 100 days of unskilled work at stipulated minimum wages from the state, making it the largest work guarantee programme in the world. The second measure was the National Food Security Act (NFSA), an improvement of the pre-existing public distribution system (PDS), through which state governments offered subsidised food grains to the poor. After establishing the historical antecedents of the MGNREGA and the PDS, this paper briefly reviews the politico-economic context of the emergence of these two initiatives in India. This includes the political and civil society imperatives that shaped the design and implementation of the schemes. Based on secondary data, the paper then examines the performance of the two programmes over time and across sub-national regions. The paper offers some explanations for the trends observed and sub-national variations. Explanations are based on both existing literature and interviews with key informants in the bureaucracy, political elites and civil society activists in New Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan. Women, Dalits and Adivasis, who generally constitute the poorest inhabitants of rural India, have disproportionately benefitted from the MGNREGA, weakening traditional relations of power. The paper highlights, in conclusion, the need for a more local-sensitive approach to policy design and greater political mobilisation of intended beneficiaries for rights-based welfare programmes to be effective in addressing social and economic insecurities of the poor.

This article contributes to further our understanding of factors shaping collective action in urban India. Based primarily on fieldwork conducted in slums and middle-class neighbourhoods in Bangalore, the article strengthens the case against a dualistic reading of collective action by identifying some important convergences between actions of middle-class and slum-based associations. It argues that new urban governance initiatives have been worked by slum-based associations to make claims in ways that are reminiscent of the 'insurgent citizenship' observed among middle-class associations. The article also highlights how slum-based mobilizations are driven not merely by patron–client political networks or the politics of stealth, but also inspired from larger identity-based movements. Middle-class associations, on the other hand, reveal increasingly deeper engagement with formal politics, a realm that the 'new politics' had not earlier engaged with.