Indian economy

This paper argues that the divergent performance of the rural economies of China and India after 1950 was a product of the different capabilities of the Chinese and Indian governments to mobilize the labor force and financial resources of the rural population. By mobilizing unpaid labor and the financial resources of the villagers through mediation by the collectives (before 1984) and local administrations (from 1984 to the abolition of agricultural taxation and compulsory rural labor mobilization in 2006), the Chinese state developed rural infrastructure and the quality of the labor force at a pace and geographical scope that was far beyond its limited fiscal capacity. Efforts by the Indian state to establish rural organizations with similar mobilization capabilities failed due to the effective opposition of well- entrenched political and economic interests in the countryside. Unable to mobilize the labor and financial resources of the villagers, the Indian government relied primarily on its limited fiscal resources, which produced a much slower development of physical infrastructure and labor force quality. These are the primary reasons why China’s rural economy developed much more rapidly than India’s, which contributed significantly to the divergence of their national economies in the post-1950 era.

Much of the existing scholarly debate on sharing economy to date has focused on the use of technology in developed countries. However, the recent upsurge of mobile technology adoption in developing countries has provided suitable breeding ground for sharing economy. The lack of native theories in tourism and hospitality sector with scare utilization of unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) provide necessity for this research. This study adapted meta-UTAUT model as theoretical lens and extended the model with hedonic motivation, trust, and self-efficacy. Based on data from 301 potential Indian consumers, the results underscored the central role of attitude that significantly mediated the effects of effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions on consumer intention to use Airbnb. Meanwhile, performance expectancy emerged as significant direct determinant of intention alongside attitude, trust, and self-efficacy. The proposed model explained as much as 65% variance on Indian consumer's intention to use Airbnb.

Keywords: Trade Learning-by-exporting hypothesis Self-selection hypothesis Total factor productivity Causality Heterogeneous firm model Recent literature tried to explain the Indian growth miracle in different ways, ranging from trade liberalization to industrial reforms. Using data on Indian manufacturing firms, this paper analyzes the relationship between firm's productivity and export market participation during 1991-2004. While it provides evidence of the self-selection hypothesis by showing that more productive firms become exporters, the results do not show that entry into export markets enhances productivity. The paper examines the explanation of self selection hypothesis for total factor productivity differences across 33,510 exporting and non-exporting firms. It uses propensity score matching to test the learning-by-exporting hypothesis. In line with the prediction of recent heterogeneous firm models of international trade, the main finding of the paper is: more productive firms become exporters but it is not the case that learning by exporting is a channel fuelling growth in Indian manufacturing.

The Akali Dal is the best organised political party in Punjab and has ruled over Punjab for a longer period than any other political party since the creation of the Punjabi-speaking state in 1966. It articulates aspirations of Punjabi regional nationalism along with trying to protect the interests of the Sikhs as a religious minority in India and abroad. As a part of shaping Punjab's economic future, it deals with the pressures of Indian and global capitalism. This paper is an attempt to track the multi-faceted pressures of class, religion and nationalism in the way Akali Dal negotiates its politics in Indian federalism.

in the Ottoman context, informational asymmetries, fears of Ottoman insolvency and an aversion by some to accepting interest. Nevertheless, Indian Muslim capital enjoyed a freer degree of circulation than in the post-Ottoman environment, where new powers sought to curtail or control it in an age of financial de-globalisation.

India's dependence on a climate sensitive sector like agriculture makes it highly vulnerable to its impacts. However, agriculture is highly heterogeneous across the country owing to regional disparities in exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. It is essential to know and quantify the possible impacts of changes in climate on crop yield for successful agricultural management and planning at a local scale. The Hadley Centre Global Environment Model version 2-Earth System (HadGEM-ES) was employed to generate regional climate projections for the study area using the Regional Climate Model (RCM) RegCM4.4. The dynamics in potential impacts at the sub-district level were evaluated using the Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 (RCPs). The aim of this study was to simulate the crop yield under a plausible change in climate for the coastal areas of South India through the end of this century. The crop simulation model, the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) 4.5, was used to understand the plausible impacts on the major crop yields of rice, groundnuts, and sugarcane under the RCP 4.5 trajectory. The findings reveal that under the RCP 4.5 scenario there will be decreases in the major C 3 and C 4 crop yields in the study area. This would affect not only the local food security, but the livelihood security as well. This necessitates timely planning to achieve sustainable crop productivity and livelihood security. On the other hand, this situation warrants appropriate adaptations and policy intervention at the sub-district level for achieving sustainable crop productivity in the future.

India is in the midst of a transformative urban awakening. The country's 380 million urban population as of 2011 is projected to swell to over 600 million by 2030 and almost 900 million by 2050. These processes of urbanization and urban growth are embedded in and shape complex political, social, demographic, environmental and ethno-religious contexts; and while the developmental advantages to urban modes of living are clear, urbanization in India comes with its own set of challenges. This introduction outlines the current special issue, which collects six articles that reflect on three key themes in contemporary urban India: urban governance and planning; social, economic and political exclusion and the conflicts this may engender; and climate change in Indian cities. Here we briefly contextualise some of these issues, and reflect on some of the cross-cutting themes that individual articles in this issue address. Our hope is that this volume contributes to debates on the dynamics of governance, inclusiveness, security and prosperity in today's urban India.

The Indian economy suffered a balance of payment crisis in 1991, which provided the context for the rolling out of neoliberal policies, also referred to as the New Economic Policy in India. This paper examines the national and global causes and context of India's economic crisis and adoption of neoliberal policies. While grounding my analysis in historical-geographical materialism, I argue that India's economic crisis was a product of certain contingent conditions. I draw attention to India's pre-neoliberal economic regime and analyse how the earlier-established relationship between revenue generation and expenditure ran into trouble; what changes occurred in the organization and management of revenues and capital; nature of interventions of the state in the circulation of capital; changes in the physical aspects of circulation of commodities, together with foreign trade and the formation of the ‘world market’; and the rise of the United States as the only global superpower. I conclude that India's economic crisis of 1990–91, and the neoliberal policies that followed, are products of contingent historical and geographical conditions. A teleological approach towards examining global capitalism and production of economic crisis often neglect such contingencies and provide a set of causalities that may, at best, be classified as incomplete.

Does decentralisation promote clientelism? If yes, through which mechanisms? We answer these questions through an analysis of India's (and the world's) largest workfare programme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), in two Indian states: Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. The two states adopted radically different implementation models: Rajasthan's decentralised one stands in contrast with Andhra Pradesh's centralised and bureaucracy-led model. Using a mixed method approach, we find find that in both states local implementers have the incentives to distribute MGNREGA work in a clientelistic fashion. However, in the Rajasthan's model, these incentives are stronger, because of the decentralised implementation model. Accordingly, our quantitative evidence shows that clientelism is more serious a problem in Rajasthan than in AP.

How do you sell a solar powered lamp to India's un-electrified, rural poor? This contribution to Anthropology for Sale explores the work of direct selling in rural India, reflecting on the forms of prejudice, difference and exclusion that are produced as multinational companies create markets for consumer goods in places of chronic global poverty. In the highlands of Orissa, India, a US company sells solar powered lights through a network of young male sales agents. The company and its products express empathy and proximity, attachment and connection to India's indigenous and low caste communities. Yet the company's salesmen are often more concerned with maintaining forms of structural advantage and their sales practices articulate social differences based on caste, class and gender. Rather than see prejudice as a peripheral effect of expansion and growth in emerging markets this paper proposes that we see it as a constitutive feature of markets at the 'bottom of the pyramid'. KEYWORDS Youth; caste; social enterprise; solar energy; bottom of the pyramid Just Sell! 'So much tension. Heavy tension.' Aseem paced around the hotel room in his string vest and shorts. It was half past nine in the morning. He had been awake for three hours, making calls to his salesmen on a mobile phone. He dialled number after number. Occasionally he got an answer. More often he got a 'busy' or 'no signal' tone. Aseem sat down on the bed and sighed heavily. He had arrived in this small market town, the administrative capital of Koraput district in the highlands of southern Odisha, India, two days previously and it was already time to leave again. His train was leaving at noon. On the mattress beside him was a half-packed travel bag and a briefcase. He was

Regimes around the world are experimenting with combinations of economic liberalization and revived state-activist strategies, producing 'new developmentalist' hybrids. This article suggests that a distinctive variant of new developmentalism is emerging in India. Its paradigmatic example crystallized in Gujarat, before and during Narendra Modi's tenure as chief minister (2001–14), and was taken national during Modi's first term as India's prime minister (2014–19). While scholars have highlighted the aggressively pro-business industrial policy of the 'Gujarat model', closer examination reveals that this state intervention was more direct and extensive than previously acknowledged. The state took on a diversity of functions, particularly focused on infrastructure. These included not only classic developmental activities such as midwifing new industries or supporting select private enterprises, but also corrective functions: disciplining consumers, compensating reform losers, and repairing the bureaucratic apparatus. Today, in the face of predictions of radical deregulation or corporate rule, this reinvented statism is visible at the all-India level. However, its history also illustrates the brittleness of India's new developmentalism, including its tendencies towards incumbency bias, resource misallocation, and debt. Political responses have often weakened accountability rather than tackling underlying problems. Both in India and elsewhere, the sustainability of new developmentalism appears uncertain.

The steel industry is one of many major world industries extnsively restructured in this era of globalization. The Global Restructuring of the Steel Industry explains how and why the steel industry has shifted from advanced capitalist countries to late industrializing countries. Drawing upon case studies of the steel industry in the US, Japan , South Korea, Brazil and India, Anthony P.D'Costa examines the relationship between industrial change and institution al responses to technological diffusion. He reveals that governments' and firms' differing responses to innovations lead to an uneven diffusion of technology and industrial reorganization. Moreover, when it becomes clear that existing institutional arrangements no longer serve the industry well, new arrangements are made which allow for innovative behaviour. Often this has created opportunities for technological "leapfrogging" and the emergence of new technologies in unexpected places. The steel industry has con sequently known a new dynamism and the open-ended nature of capitalist competition has been firmly underscored. The Global Restructuring of the Steel Industry is a timely addition to the literature of world industries and offers valuable insights into the new dynamics of industrial capitalism in the globalized age. Anthony P.D'Costa is Associate Professor of Comparative International Development at the University of Washington, Tacoma, USA. He has written on industrial restructuring in Asia, Latin America and the US and is currently researching technology leapfrogging in the Indian software industry.

International agencies, nongovernmental organizations, governmental agencies, and development policy-makers have sought to incorporate ‘gender mainstreaming’ into postconflict policies and programs in an effort to ameliorate the unequal gender impacts of war. This article uses narratives of widow heads of household collected through field research in Nepal in 2008 and 2011 to illustrate how postconflict development discourses purporting to engage with gender not only take a narrow view of gender (i.e., by equating it to women-focused activities), but also neglect the complex and dynamic realities of women's lives. Postconflict interventions employ simplistic assumptions that neglect gender-specific postconflict insecurities and oppressions (such as systematic violence against women). By neglecting the crucial significance of social networks for widows' survival, postconflict reconstruction assumes women to be individualized receptacles for development/empowerment. The crucial role of social networks in constraining women's agency is obscured. At the same time, assumptions of homogeneity ingrained in universalized categories such as ‘widow’ and ‘conflict-affected’ obfuscate women's multiple identities, roles, and agency in their struggles for survival. The insights emerging from field research suggest a greater attunement of postconflict development interventions to women's lived experiences and social settings.

Neoliberal transformation is not simply a top-down process. Neoliberal hegemony at the global level has an ally in the Indian elite in producing class-biased economic growth at the national scale. This paper examines the social contestations around India’s economic policy regime, its reproduction and transformation. It shows how the coercive power of global governance institu- tions has worked in tandem with the interest of the local elite to produce neoliberal changes in India. But class elites are not a homogeneous group. Fractures in class power affect the nature of political-economic change. Post-independence, the rural bourgeoisie, i.e., the quasi- feudal landlords and the medium-size landowners, at different stages of political-economic history, were the main social forces influencing economic policy, and the Tatas and Birlas, India’s big business houses, were their urban counterparts. 1980s were witness to the rise of a “new breed of entrepreneurs” in India with foreign business collaborations, who have now emerged as the dominant class-relevant force, constantly nudging India in the neoliberal direction. Additionally, neoliberalism has the support of the Indian upper caste since the new economic regime has created avenues for re-assertion of upper-caste power. Thus, the Indian economic space continues to be contested through endogenous politico-democratic contestations, fractured and continually reorganizing class power, caste assertions, global policy discourses and coercive power of global governance institutions.

New policy and legislative initiatives in India over the last decade, from the Special Economic Zones Act 2005 to subnational state-level counterparts, have encouraged processes of corporate urbanisation, by facilitating the development of ‘industrial townships’ largely by private actors. This emerging policy architecture places a range of municipal functions, infrastructures and services in the domain of the (private) township, paralleling processes of urban gating and enclave growth worldwide. This paper analyses the relevant policies and laws to examine the role of the state in facilitating the growth of such urban clubs in India and fostering privatised provision of public goods. With few evaluations of the scope and impacts of such urban development in India, the case of Jamshedpur, an early prototype of corporate urbanisation, highlights how such sites may encourage patterns of unplanned and under-provisioned growth around the core.

This paper uses aggregate-level data, as well as case- studies, to trace out the evolution of some key structural features of the Indian economy, relating both to the agricultural and the informal industrial sector. These aggregate trends are used to infer: (a) the dominant relations of production under which the vast majority of the Indian working people labour, and (b) the predominant ways in which the surplus labour of the direct producers is appropriated by the dominant classes. This summary account is meant to inform and link up with ongoing attempts at radically restructuring Indian society. Part I covers agriculture, while Part II inquires into the “informal” industrial sector.

In the years since liberalization, state power has been rescaled in India's polity and this is both a cause and consequence of greater inter-state competition for footloose capital. In this context, some state governments are designing special regulatory tools to attract and concentrate investments by easing ‘doing business’ for private investors and leveraging land resources—primarily in their largest cities. Equally important, they ensure public investments are channelled to these select spaces and that resources are available for maintaining high standards of infrastructure. In Hyderabad, the ‘Industrial Area Local Authority’ (IALA) is a powerful tool that allows privatised management by state and non-state actors of recently constructed productive spaces, mainly concentrating globalised service sector activities, including by collecting local tax revenues and various development charges to be spent exclusively within the industrial area. In this way, governance and fiscal functions are outsourced to non-elected bodies, outside the purview of democratic institutions. By essentially replacing municipal authorities, the IALA framework produces new forms of governance at the same time that it generates fragmentation of the institutional fabric of urban spaces. In effect, it creates a tool for by-passing urban politics, or in the case of periurban spaces does not allow an urban politics to emerge. Building on recent research, this paper examines the implications of IALAs in Hyderabad on urban governance and local state sovereignty.

This article analyses poverty, in the light of the prevailing methodological and definitional debates, in Gujarat, one of the fastest growing states in India. We examine the divergence between the official and nutrition-based poverty lines (PLs) and analyse its possible causes. First, to study whether the 'PL bundle' has changed over time, we test whether poverty is sensitive to changes in the base year; second, we examine the impact of food prices on the change in consumption at given expenditure levels; and third, we study the possible relation between poverty and foodgrain availability. We conclude that poverty is underestimated because official figures do not consider the change in consumption patterns, occurring partly as a result of high relative food prices. Nutrition poverty levels in Gujarat are higher than all-India levels, which creates a case for direct nutritional intervention for the poor.

ABSTRACT To evaluate the prevalence and impacts of the illegitimate wage practice where employers pay formal employees both a declared wage and an additional undeclared 'envelope wage', a survey involving 10,171 interviews across 10 East–Central European nations is reported to evaluate its commonality and evidence from 313 interviews conducted in Moscow to analyse its impacts.

This book explores the processes producing and reproducing the garment sweatshop in India. Drawing from Marxian and feminist insights, the book theorizes the sweatshop as a complex 'regime' of exploitation and oppression, jointly crafted by global, regional and local actors, and working across productive and reproductive realms. The analysis illustrates the links between the physical and social materiality of production, unveiling the distinct circuits of exploitation corresponding to different clothing items. As these circuits change across India, on the basis of regional patterns of product specialisation, so does the logic of the sweatshop, its composition, the social profile of the labouring poor engaged in garment work, and their working conditions. Through the eyes of sourcing actors, the whole country can be re-imagined as a giant department store, with different garment collections exhibited at different floors, and created through the sweat of different sets of labourers. Highlighting the great social differentiation of the garment workforce in factories, workshops and homes scattered across the Indian Subcontinent, the narrative also unveils the multiple patterns of unfreedom this workforce is subject to. These exceed narrow definitions of unfreedom mainly based on forced labour, which are becoming dominant in the debate on global labour standards and 'modern slavery'. By discussing interplays between productive and reproductive realms and processes of commodification and exploitation, on the contrary, the analysis highlights how social difference and unfreedom pre-exist the sweatshop and at the same time are also reproduced by it. It also highlights the role different actors – like global buyers, regional suppliers and retailers, and labour contractors – play in these processes. Indeed, the book depicts the sweatshop as a complex joint enterprise against the labouring poor, shaped and steered by multiple lords, and where production and circulation – of garments, processes and people – intertwine in manifold ways. It also shows how the labouring body is systematically and inexorably depleted and consumed by garment work, until it is finally ejected from the sweatshop. Finally, the book highlights how the study of India's sweatshop regime informs contemporary debates on industrial modernity, comparative advantage and cheap labour, modern slavery, and ethical consumerism. Alessandra Mezzadri teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research interests focus on globalisation and processes of labour informalisation; materialist approaches to global commodity chain analysis and global industrial systems, labour standards and CSR; gender and feminist theory; and the political economy of India. She has investigated in depth the Indian garment industry over a span of ten years, and illustrated the different ways in which distinct regional sweatshops are formed and reproduced across the subcontinent.

See the book launch at SOAS here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPPyhchfRdQ

A key challenge facing most emerging market economies today is how to simultaneously maintain monetary independence, exchange rate stability and financial integration subject to the constraints imposed by the trilemma, in an era of widespread globalization. In this paper we review and contrast the trilemma policy choices and trade-offs faced by the two key drivers of global economic growth: China and India. China's trilemma configurations are unique relative to other emerging markets in terms of the predominance of exchange rate stability, and in the failure of the trilemma regression to capture a consistently significant role for financial integration. In contrast, the trilemma configurations of India are in line with choices made by other emerging countries. Over time, India, like other emerging economies, has converged towards a middle ground among the three policy objectives, and has achieved comparable levels of exchange rate stability and financial integration buffered by sizeable international reserves.

Conflicts over land-grabs for industry, infrastructure and urbanization are on the rise in emerging economies. A slew of policy measures undergird such land deals in India but have encountered successful resistance from peasants and citizens groups. In Goa, resistance led to the revocation of the state’s special economic zone (SEZ) policy and cancellation of all approved SEZs, many developed by prominent realty firms. As battle over three SEZs continues in the Supreme Court of India, there is hope that commons will be returned to local communities. There is, however, an impasse on the ground that begs resolution if the gains over SEZs are to be secured. The Goan Impasse can be resolved with egalitarian and ecologically appropriate rights to landand resource-use for all that counter existing inequalities. This requires programmatic social movements reconstituting relationships around and to land and resources from below.

Using data collected from interviews with human resource managers, corporate executives, and compensation consultants in India, this paper examines the adoption of US-style employee stock option (ESO) plans among Indian information technology firms and foreign-based multinational corporations operating in India between 1998 and 2004. The findings suggest that Indian firms adopted ESOs more cautiously and granted options more selectively than those in Silicon Valley, where, by the mid-1990s, very broad grants at all organizational levels had become commonplace. The data also suggest that this more cautious and selective approach in India was driven primarily by labor market conditions, and a lack of cognitive-cultural and normative alignment between the ESO practice and the institutional environment of Indian knowledge workers. By taking seriously the perspectives of actors who play key roles in processes of practice adoption, the analysis and findings raise the issue of how our understanding of cross-national variation in the diffusion and structure of employee ownership practices, particularly in new settings, can be enhanced by new research designs and a deeper engagement with more recent developments in international human resource management research and institutional theory.

ABSTRACT:  India has been fixated on the annual growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This number averaged about 3.5% per annum from independence to the early 1980s, leaped to twice that in recent decades before falling off in the last five years to about 5% per annum. The GDP emerged at a specific moment in the evolution of capitalism and was never intended to be a measure of the quality of life of people. Gross Domestic Product discussions reveal a desperate desire on the part of many in India to be seen as having arrived into the first world. In a context marked by the paradox of electoral democracy alongside mass
poverty and rising inequality, focusing on the GDP legitimizes an unjust social order. The GDP number seeks to transform politics in a technical and asocial direction, and the obsession with it powerfully undergirds the hegemony of a neoliberal vision of India.

Keywords: India, GDP, neoliberalism, BRICs, middle class, globalization

The informal sector has become an increasingly popular subject of study. This sector has been a prominent feature of the
development landscape of many countries around the globe. It is increasingly becoming the major source of employment
in third world countries and thus constitutes a significant and important portion of labour force. In spite of its bigger size
and its contributions to the economy, however, the informal sector has been mainly looked at from the perspective of
employment and its related areas. The other potential areas of this sector, such as knowledge generation mechanisms,
appropriation, etc., have remained largely unexplored. Considering the significance of such innovations, this paper
is a modest attempt to conceptualise ‘informal sector community innovations’. Specifically, this paper addresses the
question: to what extent do ‘communities’ in the informal sector produce, manage, protect and share new knowledge.
The focus of the paper, apart from conceptualising ‘community innovations’, is to explore various informal appropriation
mechanisms used by different communities.

When and how did the third world transform into an emerging market in the global economy? Kaur addresses this ongoing reinscription of the old third world as market, unpacking new modes of imagination and knowledge at the heart of this historical shift. She argues that if the quest for valuable commodities led to the discovery of the new world in an earlier age, the early twenty-first century is characterized by the rediscovery of that familiar world along the speculative index of untapped national enclaves—signaling potentiality and accessibility—rapidly opening up across continents. The world-as-commodity captures and encloses entire territories to be transformed into branded sites of unlimited commodification and exchange and actualize the capitalist dream of unending growth. A world grasped and imagined in commodity form is what eventually can be put at the disposal of investors. Dressed up as branded commodities, third world nations become visible as attractive investment destinations in the global publicity. The article takes the spectacular Brand India exhibition at the World Economic Forum, Davos, as an example of how the commodification of the nation-form is performed, and how cultural difference is harnessed and co-opted in the service of global capital.

Despite impressive performance in terms of GDP growth after the introduction of neoliberal reforms, India continues to be the home of the largest number of hungry people in the world. The present paper is an attempt to understand two interrelated issues in this context: the impact of neoliberal reforms on agricultural development and the implication of an open economic regime on food security in India. The study reveals that the austerity measures introduced by the state in the form of decline in capital formation and public sector expenditure in agriculture have undermined the livelihood of the majority of the population in India. The implementation of the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture along with the retreat of the state in the name of fiscal discipline has significantly reduced the bargaining power of the peasants in general and the food security of the majority of the population in particular.

The implementation of economic reforms under new economic policies in India was associated with a paradigmatic shift in monetary and fiscal policy. While monetary policies were solely aimed at “price stability” in the neoliberal regime, fiscal policies were characterized by the objective of maintaining “sound finance” and “austerity.” Such monetarist principles and measures have also loomed over the global recession. This paper highlights the theoretical fallacies of monetarism and analyzes the consequences of such policy measures in India, particularly during the period of the global recession. Not only did such policies pose constraints on the recovery of output and employment, with adverse impacts on income distribution; but they also failed to achieve their stated goal in terms of price stability. By citing examples from southern Europe and India, this paper concludes that such monetarist policy measures have been responsible for stagnation, with a rise in price volatility and macroeconomic instability in the midst of the global recession.

The Covid-19 pandemic is the worst human health crisis since the 1918 flu epidemic and the worst economic crisis since the 1929-33 Great Depression. The economic crisis caused by Covid-19 is, however, likely to be even more catastrophic than that triggered by the Great Depression because the latter was confined mainly to the advanced capitalist economies while the current crisis is truly global, even if it is uneven in its regional severity (Singh 2020). Further, this economic crisis, unlike the 1929-33 Great Depression, is occurring in a period of global climate crisis creating an existential crisis for planet earth. The Paris Climate Change Accord of 2015 incorporating a consensus that has emerged among the international climate scientists stipulates that if the average global temperature rise is not kept below 1.5 degree centigrade by 2030 in comparison with the average global temperature before the start of the industrial age, the planet earth will face irreversible and catastrophic changes. Right now, in 2020, there is a window of opportunity of only 10 years left to avoid that catastrophe (Singh 2019).
Any policy response that can be visualised in Punjab has to keep this global scenario of climate crisis and economic crisis in mind and the limitations that a state government has within India’s federal capitalist economy. These limitations can be partially overcome by stretching the policy discourse that is usually associated with what a state government can do to include what other civil society institutions can do, and partially by utilising the full potential of what a state government can do within federal limits. A political environment within India as a whole has to be created in which Punjab has a crucial role to play despite its small size and relatively low bargaining power in India’s parliamentary politics to encourage state governments to be bold in their efforts to break the stranglehold of central/federal power. An institutionalised centralisation has been increasing right from the framing of India’s constitution but becoming so overwhelming more recently that not to confront the central powers has become normalised. Due to this stifling normalisation, it happens too often that the state governments stop too soon before stretching to the limit their capacity to take initiative and action in policy formulation and implementation.

In this paper we examine whether foreign banks presence has helped reduce concentration in the Indian banking market and thus increased competition among banks. Concentration has been measured using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of concentration and regressed on a set of explanatory variables derived from relevant theory and prior studies. A dummy variable has been added to measure the impact of ownership on concentration to answer our research question most directly. The results of the study show that entry of foreign banks did not have significant impact on reducing the level of concentration in the Indian banking market. This may be because of many restrictions still in place on foreign bank activities in India. Hence the current efforts being made to establish level playing field among all banks need to be continued so as to make Indian banking market competitive.

During the post-liberalization period the Indian tea industry has been facing a severe crisis. This study looks at the question of inter-generational occupational mobility among tea garden labour in Assam, against the backdrop of, on the one hand, a fall in tea auction prices, decline in exports, and closure and abandonment of tea gardens; and on the other hand, increasing labour unrest, at times leading to violent protests and confrontations, declining living standards and worsening human security in the tea gardens. On the basis of data collected through first-hand primary research in three tea gardens of upper Assam, the paper analyses limitations on the inter-generational occupational mobility of tea garden labourers. We also probe into the reasons behind the relative mobility or immobility of tea garden labourers within and outside the tea gardens.

With access to data communication networks and the prevalence of informal work, workers in the global South are rapidly inching closer to confronting the impact of automated or digitally enabled non-standard employment. What are the social and political responses required to face this shifting engagement with the means of automated production and the experience of digital work mediated through privately owned global technology platforms? By examining India's job market, with a focus on the country's information technology (IT) industry, this chapter assesses whether the International Labour Organization's (ilo) focus on labour rights and social protection is suited to addressing the potential for capital-labour substitution and the new ecosystem of software-mediated work. The chapter suggests a new engagement with digital labour, closer scrutiny of unregulated working conditions, and democratic control over tech-enabled digital platforms.

In this paper, we investigate whether the seemingly discretionary and flexible approach of India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), can in practice be described by a Taylor-type rule. We estimate an exchange-rate-augmented Taylor rule for India over the period 1980Q1 to 2008Q4. We investigate monetary policy changes between the pre- and post-liberalization periods, in order to capture the potential impact of macroeconomic structural changes on the RBI’s monetary policy conduct. Overall, we find that output gap seems to matter more to RBI than inflation, there is greater sensitivity to Consumer Price (CPI) inflation, exchange rate changes do not constitute an important policy factor, and post-1998 conduct of monetary policy seems to have changed in the direction of less inertia.