The State In India

India has the largest number of non-schoolgoing working children in the world. Why has the government not removed them from the labor force and required that they attend school, as have the governments of all developed and many developing countries? To answer this question, this major comparative study first looks at why and when other states have intervened to protect children against parents and employers. By examining Europe of the nineteenth century, the United States, Japan, and a number of developing countries, Myron Weiner rejects the argument that children were removed from the labor force only when the incomes of the poor rose and employers needed a more skilled labor force. Turning to India, the author shows that its policies arise from fundamental beliefs, embedded in the culture, rather than from economic conditions. Identifying the specific values that elsewhere led educators, social activists, religious leaders, trade unionists, military officers, and government bureaucrats to make education compulsory and to end child labor, he explains why similar groups in India do not play the same role.

Since the 1940s, revaluations of the nature of the State have been a major preoccupation among historians worldwide. There has been a debate on the extent to which the State is independent of the interests of the ruling class. Pre-colonial India provides a unique testing ground for such debates, for it provides examples of State forms which vary enormously. Yet serious consideration of the nature of State forms in India was often overwhelmed by a focus on 'caste' and 'brahminism'. Now, however, as Professor Kulke demonstrates in his Introduction to this book - which consists of all the major essays on this important theme - several basic forms of the State can be isolated. Although the notion of 'centralized empire' still dominates the historiography, alternative models such as 'the segmentary state' and 'the patrimonial state' have given rise to productive debates.

Wilkinson.--William Crawley "Asian Affairs"

About the Book A LUCID, NECESSARY ACCOUNT OF HOW DRASTICALLY THE INDIAN STATE FAILS ITS CITIZENS The story of democratic failure is usually read at the level of the nation, while the primary bulwarks of democratic functioning-the states-get overlooked. This is a tale of India's states, of why they build schools but do not staff them with teachers; favour a handful of companies so much that others slip into losses; wage water wars with their neighbours while allowing rampant sand mining and groundwater extraction; harness citizens' right to vote but brutally crack down on their right to dissent. Reporting from six states over thirty-three months, award-winning investigative journalist M. Rajshekhar delivers a necessary account of a deep crisis that has gone largely unexamined. About the Author M. Rajshekhar started his career as a business reporter in 1997. He began reporting on environmental issues as a freelance journalist in 2005. After a brief stint with the World Bank, an MA at the University of Sussex, and two years of independent research-spent studying the village-level impact of an agribusiness model in central India and the drafting process which produced India's Forest Rights Act-he joined the Economic Times to report on rural India and environment in 2010. During this period, he won two Shriram Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism (2013 and 2014). He joined Scroll.in in 2015 to do a thirty-three-month-long reporting project, Ear to the Ground, which became the substrate for this book. This series won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award (2015), the Bala Kailasam Memorial Award (2016), and two more Shriram Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism (2015 and 2016). He now writes on energy, environment, climate change, political corruption and oligarchy.

This book explores the relationship between the state, development policy, and gender (in)equality in India. It discusses the formation of state policy on gender and development in India in the post-1990 period through three key organising concepts of institutions, discourse, and agency. The book pays particular attention to whether the international policy language of gender mainstreaming has been adopted by the Indian state, and if so, to what extent and with what results. The author examines how these issues play out at multiple levels of governance – at both the national and the subnational (state) level in federal India. This comparative aspect is particularly important in the context of increasing autonomy in development policymaking in India in the 1990s, divergent development policy approaches and outcomes among states, and the emerging importance of subnational state development policies and programmes for women in this period. The author argues that the state is not a monolith but a heterogeneous, internally differentiated collection of institutions, which offers complex and varying opportunities and consequences for feminists engaging the state. Demonstrating that the Indian empirical case is illuminating for studies of the gendered politics of development, and international debates on gender mainstreaming, the book highlights the politics of negotiating gender equality strategies in the contemporary context of neo-liberal development and brings together complex issues of modernity, postcolonialism, identity politics, federalism, and equality within the broader context of the world’s largest democracy. This book will be of interest to scholars interested in the politics of gender equality, state feminism, and gender mainstreaming; federalism and multi-level governance; and development studies and gender in South Asia.

In The State and Poverty in India the author argues cogently that well-organised, left-of-centre parties in government are the most effective in implementing reform.

This volume discusses the nature of the Indian state from the ancient period up to the present. It is a significant contribution toward understanding and envisioning relationships between the state and society and between secularism and religiosity.