Economic and Political Weekly

Adoptions for All

Vol - XLIX No. 11, March 15, 2014

Editorials

The Supreme Court takes an important step to end civic disabilities based on religious laws.

Easing Unbearable Pain

Vol - XLIX No. 11, March 15, 2014

Editorials

The amended narcotic drugs law will bring much longed-for relief to lakhs of sufferers.

Editorials The Ukrainian Crisis Geopolitical manoeuvres by world powers have further aggravated the Ukrainian crisis. Read more	Margin Speak On the Murder of Nido Taniam Anand Teltumbde While the murder of the 19-year-old student from Arunachal Pradesh, Nido Taniam, powerfully foregrounds the issue of racism, in the resultant cacophony, issues concerning the continuing neglect of the north-east and the severe state repression... Read more
Commentary Conservation and Development in the Western Ghats A Tale of Two Committees and More Kanchan Chopra The Ministry of Environment and Forests by its hasty order of 20 December 2013 has set in motion events that go against the recommendations of the Western Ghats Ecology Experts Panel and the High Level Working Group. Decisions with respect to the... Read more	Commentary Nido Taniam and the Fraught Question of Racism in India Thangkhanlal Ngaihte Racial prejudice against people from the north-east is most acutely felt at the institutional level where their Indianness is also questioned. Racism cannot be addressed unless the police force is reformed and sensitised. Read more
Commentary Thinking about the 21st Century Indian City Sanchita B Saxena, Gowri Vijayakumar New ways of envisioning the slum, the informal economy, access to water, and the housing crisis emerged from discussions in "Towns, Metros, and the Indian Economy", a conference held at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements,... Read more	Commentary The Legality of Plain Packaging under International Law Aridhi Anderson Plain packaging is recommended by the guidelines of the World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and has been successfully implemented in Australia since 2012. Research anticipates its effectiveness in the Indian context... Read more
Commentary The Muscular Monk Vivekananda, Sports and Physical Culture in Colonial Bengal Amitava Chatterjee, Souvik Naha Swami Vivekananda's thoughts are a complex and multidimensional interplay of India's ancient and medieval past and his 19th century milieu. He was an ardent advocate of masculinity and sports. This article discusses the infl uential... Read more	Review Article Market System of Capitalism on Trial Anjan Chakrabarti The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers by Michael Perelman (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011; Delhi: Aakar Books, for South Asia), 2011; pp 360, Rs 650. Read more
Perspectives The Middle Class and Economic Reforms Ashok K Lahiri The middle class is the basis of a strong and functional democracy. Indian economic policy has, in the past, focused almost entirely on the poor, but the end of poverty lies in the production of the middle class, one that would include many of... Read more	Special Articles The Tragedy of Identity Reflections on Violent Social Conflict in Western Assam Sripad Motiram, Nayantara Sarma Trying to shed light on the Bodo-Muslim conflict in the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District and neighbouring areas of western Assam, this paper locates the conflict in its larger context and attempts to identify the recent factors that have... Read more
Special Articles Changing Voting Patterns in Rural West Bengal Role of Clientelism and Local Public Goods Pranab Bardhan, Sandip Mitra, Dilip Mookherjee, Anusha Nath This paper uses two successive rounds of voter surveys in rural West Bengal in a household panel to find reasons for the recent decline in the Left Front's political popularity. It does not find evidence of any significant role of changes in... Read more	Special Articles Political Economy of India's Tertiary Education Persistence and Change Simantini Krishnan Privatisation of tertiary education in liberalising India has taken place in the presence of a centralised regulatory regime. This phenomenon does not conform to explanations that understand privatisation as a direct consequence of withdrawal of... Read more
Notes Bengal Famine of 1943 An Appraisal of the Famine Inquiry Commission Madhusree Mukerjee Comparing the secret transcripts of the hearings of the Famine Commission that went into the reasons for Bengal's 1943 famine with its published report reveals serious omissions and obfuscations. These call into question scholars'... Read more	Discussion The Nandy Conundrum Arvind Kumar, Sriti Ganguly This is a response to K V Cybil's controversial poser (EPW, 12 October 2013) in the context of Ashis Nandy's comments on dalits at the 2013 Jaipur literary fest. Can Nandy's own writings on humiliation help us reflect on this controversy and what... Read more
Web Exclusives Polavaram Project Violation of Constitutional Safeguards of Adivasis M Bharath Bhushan, Palla Trinadh Rao, E.Revathi This is an appeal to withdraw amendments to the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Bill to divide the tribal region by transferring scheduled villages from Khammam district to Andhra Pradesh. Read more	Web Exclusives Filling the Gaps: Rooftop Solar Projects in India Annie Philip With a high population density, large tracts of land required for large-scale solar projects will be hard to come by in India in the near future. And this is where small-scale rooftop solar projects can fill in the gap and address the ever-... Read more
Web Exclusives The Ideology of Suspended Animation Madhu Bhaduri The Aam Aadmi Party’s claim to be a party with a difference rings hollow today. With its eye on the assembly elections in Haryana and the Lok Sabha elections thereafter, it seems to be indulging in as much political opportunism as any other... Read more	Blogs Ergonomics of ‘Photography is Prohibited’ National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi was celebrating Amrita Sher-Gil's birth centenary by exhibiting her major works. I heard about it on Twitter. I first read about Amrita Sher-Gil in a school text book. Although primary... Read more
Blogs What is Muslim vote bank? The ‘Muslim vote bank’ is an established political template by which the voting behaviour of Muslim communities in India is understood and analysed. We are told that the ‘Muslim vote’ is very decisive in electoral politics... Read more

Vol - XLIX No. 11
March 15, 2014

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Review of Rural Affairs: June 29, 2013
With Indian agriculture growing slowly, employment in agriculture too has been increasing at a low rate. Urban employment has not expanded rapidly enough to provide work for the growing rural population. So, is the rise in non-agricultural employment in recent years driven more by distress than demand? Three articles in this edition of the Review of Rural Affairs look at aspects of this issue.
A couple of related issues that are examined are the growth of “non-cultivating households” and the movement of wages of agricultural labour.

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Swadeshi in the Time of Nations
A set of five articles revisit themes from Sumit Sarkar’s book, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal and find resonances across time and space for both the themes the book raised as well as for the politics and ideologies of the movement it studied.

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