Political economy of contemporary India

A good comprehensive book that covers all major issues of Indian agriculture, over time and space, has been missing for a while, and here is one such book by Akina Venkateswerlu which can fill that void. With broad objective to cover all issues and give a political economy analysis at one place, the book becomes little bulky, with about 22 chapters, divided into seven parts. These essentially cover a long list of issues like colonial impact, land reforms, Green Revolution, Neoliberal reforms, credit, marketing, extension, PDS, procurement, WTO obligations, GM seeds, SEZs, post-globalization agrarian crisis, and mode of production, blending critical review, data and policy issues, covering seventy years. The breadth of issues covered at one place has its advantages. The book has an implicit framework of political economy, state policy being seen as an outcome of promoting interests of contending class forces. The book purports the efforts of the state to promote growth determined by the capital accumulation, the speed and the social character of the accumulating class. The standard narrative of this approach presents the policy failures and achievements as progressive and constrained process of aiding the capitalist development. The book in its part gives precisely these aspects, locating them since colonial times to the post-independent development. Chapter 1 discusses the impact of colonial policy on Indian agriculture, its forcible commercializing, taxation policies, creating complex semi-feudal structures in land, labour, credit and output markets and the resultant long-term stagnation and misery. The book also takes us at a great length through the failures of making progressive land redistribution (chapters 4 and 5) and resorting to technological options to increase the market surplus. The book puts the assessment of green revolution, including India, as of precarious dependence on US imports under PL 480 and its influence on our policy choices of technology. In spite of criticism, green revolution is hailed for boosting area under new seeds, productivity and output and in enabling the country to overcome acute food shortage, become self-sufficient, reduce rural poverty, increased modernization, per capital availability and an agrarian change. The book takes us through the achievements, growth from mid-seventies and eighties, increasing yields, expanded area and production. Chapters 7, 8 and 9 elaborately document

2011

Agricultural policy reform is one of the major challenges facing India today. Such reform is required in order to reduce poverty through faster agricultural growth and to promote more sustainable use of natural resources while ensuring food security. Subsidy policies that promote the use of fertilizer and of electricity for groundwater irrigation are in particular need of reform. While subsidies for these two inputs played a crucial role in achieving India's Green Revolution, they have been criticized during the past decade for benefiting large-scale farmers more than smallholders, placing a fiscal burden on the state, and having negative environmental effects. By analyzing the evolution of these input subsidy policies and examining the political processes involved in efforts to reform them, this study throws new light on the factors that have so far prevented a move toward more pro-poor and environmentally sustainable agricultural input policies in India. The authors show that ...

Indian state after introducing economic reforms in 1992 has accelerated the economic growth. This has led to profound changes in the Indian economy, amidst other changes that have taken place simultaneously. The other changes include demographic change, the birth of a 300 million middle class, and rapid social change. Economic reforms have also resulted in widening of the gap between the economic groups, in addition to regional disparities in the country, and rural-urban disparities. It is controversial whether this growth, led primarily by market, should be called 'development' without, however, gainsaying that the middleclass and the upper classes have benefited from it. This scenario is compounded by multiple changes in Indian society. While village as a microcosm of Indian civilization has ceased to be so, the overall changes brought by the economic basis of the country have resulted in complex social and political scenarios. These changes are also compounded by the 2014 election of Hindu nationalist government, which leads the state, and has tough task to maintain social cohesion, and meet popular expectations, amidst the tumult of changes in India.

Asian Journal of Science, 2013

Indian Journal of Human Development, 2020

The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 2017

Any discussion on the theme of Political Economy of any country, especially of India, runs the risk of being labeled as Marxist interpretation of economy. In fact, a large part of early writings on political economy was focused on analyzing the nature of state, sources of growth, class relations, distribution question and asset distribution. It took an aggregative view of the economy and attempted to arrive at generalized conclusions. However, there have been attempts to have a new line of thinking on political economy of India by Rudolph and Rudolph (1987) and Frankel (2005) with a realization that India defies generalizations and cannot be adequately viewed in the aggregate and mainly in economic terms. This analysis has to take into account the caste and regional aspirations/conflicts. The liberal reforms of 1990s have unleashed a new set of conflicts and forces which have altered old productions relations. The present volume is situated in this context where it is taking a disaggregated view of emerging political economy of India. There are fourteen chapters divided into four sections. The first chapter is the introduction where the authors have provided justification of the present volume which has emerged out of a conference held at Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai in November 2014. This chapter revisits earlier debates on political economy of India and shows the shift from 'intermediate regime' to crony capitalism. The idea of 'intermediate regime' was picked up by K. N. Raj from Kalecki and was used to offer class theoretic explanation for the modest performance of India economy. This introduction essentially limits itself to the review of non-Marxian analyses of political economy of India. Marxist analysis of & Nripendra Kishore Mishra

Policy Sciences, 1989

Over the last ten years, policy change in the third world has become a matter of considerable intellectual and practical importance. For the theoretically inclined, how one explains changes in the behavior of the state is the main issue. Both Marxian and liberal orthodoxies had a tendency to 'read off' state behavior from the power relationships at the level of the society, though differing in the way they conceptualized power. The return of institutional and statecentric explanations over the last decade has attempted to reverse this bias by looking more closely at the power struggles within the state institutions. For the practically inclined, the powerful intellectual rationale behind so many policy recommendations has often been puzzlingly lost in the maze of politics. What 'interests' impede the implementation of good 'ideas,' what 'institutions' block 'getting policies right'-these are some of the key questions on the agenda of international development institutions. Responding to these varied concerns, this paper analyzes a particularly successful case of policy change. While most of third world was still experimenting with land reforms and cooperatives as the ways to develop agriculture, India in the mid-1960s switched to producer price incentives and investments in new technology, a change that is widely believed to have turned India from a food-deficit to a food-surplus country. The focus is on how ideas, interests and institutions interacted to produce the change.

IASSI Quarterly, 2021

The present economic impasse of the inability to create employment for large sections of the society and achieving a degree of manufacturing growth need to be analysed in historical terms of colonisation, domestic capital and, incomplete structural transformation. Two hundred years of colonial rule allowed a constrained capitalism into the early 20th century and post-independent growth is marked by a passive bourgeois revolution over a moribund semi-feudalism. Globalisation has given residual opportunities and a limited momentum to break out of the low income trap. The essay traces the trajectory of India's capitalist development through global and domestic vicissitudes to the present imbroglio of the middle-income trap.

Artha Journal of Social Sciences, 2022

This paper is an analysis of the controversial reforms introduced in the agricultural market of India in 2020. The researcher does a comprehensive review of these reforms using data obtained from Kerala and interlinks the components in the existing literature to proceed for a macro-level examination. This is to critically understand the policy dimensions of the laws introduced and their subsequent repeal. The background and evolution of market-mediated reforms in the agricultural sector, the immediate drive for a new set of laws, the question of middlemen in the market, the structural inequalities, and the resultant power asymmetry in Indian rural society are addressed. There are also informed suggestions for possible ways to guarantee a Minimum Support Price (MSP). More than a systemic critique of the newly introduced (and later repealed) farm laws, the real problems in the agricultural market are placed to check the changing direction and agenda in market reforms.