Transition And Development In India

According to Nehru, the transition from a backward agricultural society to a modern industrialized society was the only road for India to progress. So, for the past few decades, India has focused its transitional development around movement away from a state-controlled economy toward that of a free market economy. Transition and Development in India challenges the current basis of this theory of development, laying the groundwork for an entirely new Marxist approach to transition that should apply not just to India, but to all developing nations.

In the Global South, indigenous people have been continuously subjected to top-down, and often violent, processes of post-colonial state and nation building. This book examines the development dilemmas of the indigenous people (adivasis) of the Indian state of Kerala. It explores the different facets of change in their lives and livelihoods in the context of modernisation under different political regimes. As part of the Indian Union, Kerala followed a development approach in tune with the Government of India with regard to indigenous communities. However, within the framework of India’s quasi-federal polity, the state of Kerala has been tracing a development path of its own, which has come to be known as the ‘Kerala model of development’. Adopting a historical political economic approach, the book locates the adivasi communities in the larger contextual shifts from late colonialism through the post-independence years, and critically analyses the Kerala model of development with particular reference to the adivasis’ changing political status and rights to land. It pays special attention to policy dynamics in the neoliberal phase, and the actual practices of decentralisation as a way of including the socially excluded and marginalised. Offering a theoretical elaboration of the interaction between class and indigeneity based on intensive fieldwork in Kerala, the book addresses adivasi development in relation to the general development experience of Kerala, and goes on to relate this particular study to the global context of indigenous people’s struggles. It will be of interest to those working in the fields of South Asian Development, Political Economy and South Asian Politics.

Jagdish Bhagwati, one of the world's leading economists, offers a fascinating overview of the policies that produced India's sorry economic performance over a third of a century. His analysis puts into sharp focus the crippling effects of the inward-looking, bureaucratic regime that grew to Kafkaesque dimensions, starting in the early 1950s. It provides therefore a coherent and convincing rationale for the economic reforms begun in June 1991 by the new government of PrimeMinister Rao. These reforms, also discussed by Professor Bhagwati, are thus set into historical and analytical perspective. Written with wit and elegance, this text of the 1992 Radhakrishnan Lectures at Oxford is readily accessible to a wide readership.

Taking the period following the advent of liberalization, this book explains the transition of the Indian economy against the backdrop of development. If the objective is to explore the new economic map of India, then the distinct contributions in the book could be seen as twofold. The first is the analytical frame whereby the authors deploy a unique Marxist approach consisting of the initial concepts of class process and the developing countries to address India's economic transition. The second contribution is substantive whereby the authors describe India's economic transition as epochal, materializing out of the new emergent triad of neo-liberal globalization, global capitalism and inclusive development. This is how the book theorizes the structural transformation of the Indian economy in the twenty-first century. Through this framework, it interrogates and critiques the given debates, ideas and policies about the economic development of a developing nation.

Human Development in India is an invaluable report for policymakers, researchers, non-governmental organizations, international agencies, and interested readers---from India and abroad---who wish to know more about one of the fastest growing economies in the world. --Book Jacket.