Description
Much of the discussion of India in the public sphere has focused on economic policy settings and restructuring, annual growth rates, trade relations and the nation’s status as an economic and political actor within the international system. This collection considers other dimensions of socio-economic transformation in India and its profound impact on society and nature. While economic and ecological fragility are now very apparently problems of a ‘global’ scale they are nevertheless grounded and experienced at the local scale where vulnerable and marginal people located in the urban periphery and in rural areas confront these ‘crises’ most acutely. The studies in this collection encompass many of the most important social and political concerns of India in this age of crisis, namely, the politics of water resources and land acquisition and use; the interaction between food security, markets, and institutions; the politics and strategies of labour movements; narratives and practices of ‘development’ and contestation over forms of agrarian production in India; the link between urbanisation and local class, caste and political actors; and the potential for civil society to either be co-opted or to contest neoliberal logics and forms of governance.
This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of South Asian Studies.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: India and the Age of Crisis 2. Accumulation and Dispossession: Contradictions of Growth and Development in Contemporary India 3. Labour Movements and the Age of Crisis: Scale, Form and Repertoires of Action in India and Beyond 4. Dispossession by Confusion from Mineral-Rich Lands in Central India 5. Food Security as a Lagging Component of India’s Human Development: A Function of Interacting Entitlement Failures 6. Agrarian Crisis in Punjab and ‘Natural Farming’ as a Response 7. Trans-Boundary Water Resources and Uneven Development: Crisis Within and Beyond Contemporary India 8. Doing Development or Creating Dependency? NGOs and Civil Society in India 9. The Micro-Politics of Urban Transformation in the Context of Globalisation: A Case Study of Gurgaon, India
