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PRIYA — India’s first female superhero has to protect her enchanted forest from greedy industrialists threatening to cut down all the trees. With the help of a little girl named Somya and the local villagers, they defend their home — reminiscent of India’s Chipko movement. Priya shows Somya, who is suffering from asthma due to the toxic haze — the beauty of her forest and its power to heal Mother Earth and her.
This book analyzes India’s impressive efforts in responding to sensational and easily visible disasters in contrast to the ‘silent emergency’ of drought-induced under nutrition and starvation deaths. Building on Amartya Sen’s famous claim that no famine has ever occurred in a democratic country, it re-examines the relationship between democracy, public action and famine prevention. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data in India at national, state and local levels as well as in-depth field visits to two states on India’s east coast, Orissa and West Bengal, the author analyzes the following issues: the interaction between specific institutions in India and their accountab...
Scholars of distributive politics often emphasize partisanship and clientelism. However, as Jennifer Bussell demonstrates in Clients and Constituents, legislators in "patronage democracies" also provide substantial constituency service: non-contingent, direct assistance to individual citizens. Bussell shows how the uneven character of access to services at the local level-often due to biased allocation on the part of local intermediaries-generates demand for help from higher-level officials. The nature of these appeals in turn provides incentives for politicians to help their constituents obtain public benefits. Drawing on a new cross-national dataset and extensive evidence from India-including sustained qualitative shadowing of politicians, novel elite and citizen surveys, and an experimental audit study with a near census of Indian state and national legislators-this book provides a theoretical and empirical examination of political responsiveness in developing countries. It highlights the potential for an under-appreciated form of democratic accountability, one that is however rooted in the character of patronage-based politics.
This book discusses women-oriented microfinance initiatives in India and their articulation vis-à-vis state developmentalism and contemporary neo-liberal capitalism. It examines how these initiatives encourage economically disadvantaged rural women to make claims upon state-provided microcredit and connect with multiple state institutions and agencies, thereby reshaping their gendered identities. The author shows how Self-Help Group (SHG)-based microfinance institutions mobilise agency and create channels of empowerment for women as well as make them responsible for alleviating poverty for themselves and their families. The book also brings out the importance of factoring in women’s dissenting voices when they negotiate developmental projects at the grassroots level. Rich in empirical data, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of development studies, gender studies, economics, especially microeconomics, politics, public policy and governance.
This book assesses the validity of ‘anti-politics’ critiques of development, first popularised by James Ferguson, in the peculiar context of India. It examines the new context provided by decentralization of state functioning where keeping politics out of development (development as the anti-politics machine) can no longer be taken for granted. The case of a highly technocratic state watershed development programme that also seeks to be participatory is used to illustrate the tensions between prescriptive development policy and a growing political democracy.
The Book Environmental Sustainability In The 21st Century: Emerging Issues And The Way Forward represents the various emerging issues very much relevant to our environment in this 21st Century. An Environment is everything that is around us, which includes both living and nonliving things such as soil, water, animals and plants, which adapt themselves to their surroundings. The environment plays an important role in the existence of life on the planet earth. The most serious environmental problems of the twenty-first century have the potential to alter the course of life on this planet. Global warming, toxic waste, water and air pollution, acid rain, and shrinking energy supplies are frightening challenges that may threaten our future if we do not face up to them. In this book 23 chapters have been incorporated on various environmental issues and challenges we are facing now a days from various academicians and researchers.
This book assesses the impact of liberalization on practices of government and relations between state and society. It is clear that liberalization as state policy has complex forms of regulation and deregulation inbuilt, and these policies have resulted in dramatic increases in productivity and economic wealth but also generated spectacular new forms of inequality between social groups, regions, and sectors. Through a detailed examination of the Indian state, the contributors - all experts in their respective fields - explore questions such as: Have the new inequalities resulted in greater social unrest and violence? How has the meaning of citizenship changed? What will the long-term effect...
The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography provides an authoritative and comprehensive source of information on the discipline of human geography and its constituent, and related, subject areas. The encyclopedia includes over 1,000 detailed entries on philosophy and theory, key concepts, methods and practices, biographies of notable geographers, and geographical thought and praxis in different parts of the world. This groundbreaking project covers every field of human geography and the discipline’s relationships to other disciplines, and is global in scope, involving an international set of contributors. Given its broad, inclusive scope and unique online accessibility, it is anticip...
Contributed articles in honor of S. N. Ratha, former professor at Sambalpur University, Orissa.
The Zapotec observe that 'a bad compromise is better than a good fight'. Why? This study of the legal system of the Zapotec village of Talea suggests that compromise and, more generally, harmony are strategies used by colonized groups to protect themselves from encroaching powerholders or strategies the colonizers use to defend themselves against organized subordinates. Harmony models are present, despite great organizational and cultural differences, in many parts of the world. However, the basic components of harmony ideology are the same everywhere: an emphasis on conciliation, recognition that resolution of conflict is inherently good and that its reverse - continued conflict or controversy - is bad, a view of harmonious behaviour as more civilized than disputing behaviour, the belief that consensus is of greater survival value than controversy. The book's central thesis is that harmony ideology in Talea today is both a product of nearly 500 years of colonial encounter and a strategy for resisting the state's political and cultural hegemony.