Review Issues

The paper discusses the case of emigrant women domestic workers from Kerala, a state which has had a long history of migration of workers in this segment. It draws attention to the critical failure of the social science scholarship to address the question of poor women migrants. It also provides an overview of state policy on migration and underlines its complicity in generating regulatory gaps. The paper engages with the gendering of citizenship and sovereignty through a comparison of the state policy on migrant women workers and the experience of three segments of this workforce - emigrant nurses, domestic workers and outmigrant fish processing workers. It then considers the question of agency in the context of women workers who are thrust into the position of breadwinners for their families and, finally, the question of responsible state intervention.

Much of the scholarship associated with the "urban turn" in south Asia has focused on the upper middle class or the poor. This study examines social change through the lens of interstitial places and populations. In particular, it focuses on young men who find themselves "in-between" in multiple senses: between youth and adulthood, the rich and poor, and the rural and urban. This "in-betweenness" shapes how they navigate a changing economic and institutional landscape. It also shows how the forms of enterprise they engage in stitch together the rural and urban in new ways.

The bazaar or intermediate classes have remained outside the predominant research imagination on urban change. Delhi's wholesale and retail traders, the primary subjects of this paper, are a subset of this bazaar world. This paper uses a case study of the Supreme ourtordered sealing drives of 2006-07 to investigate how these traders were threatened by eviction dynamics earlier experienced by slum-dwellers and small-scale industrialists. Trader groups, thus, must be included within narratives of displacement despite being deeply enmeshed in the growth of the "world-class" city and lifestyles. This paper examines how a dispersed trader presence located across the city became a citywide protesting public and the multiple political strategies it used in coalescing public opposition.

Visits to seven small towns in north India reveal how paucity of funds, slipshod planning and a dearth of capabilities have contributed to poor civic services and inadequate infrastructure. Citizens in some areas have organised themselves into neighbourhood committees to tackle problems that the urban bodies neglect, but this has its limitations and cannot substitute for efficient local government. The keys to tap the rich potential in these small towns are purposeful research, participative planning, responsive governance and healthy finances.

Over the last two decades or so the dominant mode of talking about Indian agriculture has been that of “crisis”. Commentators and scholars have tended to attribute this crisis of the agrarian economy to larger processes at work, particularly to globalisation and the new policies of economic reforms initiated by India during the early years of the 1990s. While there may be some truth in these explanations, the framing of the “agrarian”, “rural” question in this discourse presents the complex and diverse rural realities in simplistic and populist terms. Such a discourse also invokes a sectoral policy response, where agriculture as a sector is seen as needing state attention, and ignores the internal dynamics of changing caste and class relations on the ground. Based on a revisit to two villages of Haryana, this paper provides a brief account of the changing nature of class relations in a post-green revolution rural setting with a specific focus on the changing nature of attached and “unfree” labour.