Special Articles

From 2003, the Indian economy enjoyed a boom in growth for five years. The economy grew at a rate close to 9% per year, until it was punctured by the financial crisis of 2008. What explains that boom? Did the sustained liberal reforms finally pay off? Or was it a debt-led, cyclical boom, coinciding with an exceptional phase in the world economy? This paper contends that it was the latter case, driven by private corporate investments, financed by rising domestic savings, and topped by unprecedented inflows of foreign capital- leaving behind heightened corporate leverage, and frothy asset markets. As the global economy faces a semi-slump and precarious macroeconomic balance, how to reverse the current slowdown is at the crux of the discourse on India's policy paralysis. With the corporate sector mired in over-leverage, perhaps the most credible policy options now available are to step up public infrastructure to boost investment demand, and expand bank credit on easy terms to the informal sector and agriculture - which were throttled during the boom years - so as to ease supply constraints.

As the conflict over land assumes a central dynamic within the "growing Indian economy", forcible acquisition, or the state's power of eminent domain, is critical to various political and economic calculations. This paper discusses the doctrine of eminent domain in the context of dispossession and emergent land and resource conflicts in India. The origin of the doctrine in pre-constitutional colonial law, the legal mechanisms of land reform and acquisition laws through which it finds expression, and the recently proposed mechanisms for acquisition that expand its power and conflate public purpose with private capitalist interests are discussed. The paper examines the dual nature that lends itself to redistributive justice and the dispossession of already marginalised citizenry. It then examines the vexatious concept of sovereignty animating the doctrine, discusses existing substantive limits to its power that need to be given primacy and the uneven jurisprudence around the doctrine. It argues for contextualised rights to land- and resource-use regimes, concluding with observations on the implications of the doctrine's continuing and expanded scope.

Substantial proportions of married women in India report experiencing physical and sexual violence within their households. Most studies examining the risk and protective factors of marital violence have used crosssectional data to understand the determinants of physical and sexual marital violence. To identify determinants of recent experiences of physical and sexual marital violence, this survey collected data from 4,880 rural women of four states - Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand and Bihar - drawn from the National Family Health Survey-2 conducted in 1998-99 and a follow-up study for a subgroup of women carried out in 2002-03. The findings underscore the need to support programmes that aim to increase the education level of women and girls, make parents aware of the effects parental violence has on their children's well-being and improve married women's financial autonomy by increasing their financial literacy and awareness regarding various savings and asset-building options. Further, programmes and laws targeting dowry exchange and alcohol consumption need to be simultaneously developed.

This essay examines the nexus between self-determination, imperialism and the importance of Marxist theory in Lenin's writings. It argues that the three strands were inseparably connected in Lenin's thinking. The breakdown of the unity of the three strands of thought has impeded our understanding of contemporary imperialism

The rapid growth of urban India has added new saliency to the resource conflict between the burgeoning cities and village India that continues to be the home for vast majority of Indians. Cities, like living organisms, depend on external metabolic flows to keep them alive. Among all the metabolic flows of matter and energy none is more important than water - especially water used for meeting basic drinking water and other domestic consumption needs. This paper develops a metabolic framework for domestic water use in Bangalore, one of the fastest growing urban agglomerations in India. Our urban metabolism framework treats the city as a tightly-coupled social-ecological system and shows that a spatially explicit understanding of consumption patterns is crucial to addressing three central aspects of the water conundrum - equity, ecological sustainability and economic efficiency.