Barbara Harriss-White

When the nation or the “centre” and their relations with constituent states are challenged by forces that are neither disciplined nor stabilised inside national territories, then economic regions expand and challenge the capacities of states to regulate them. This paper presents insights gained from new maps of India’s material and cultural regions, manifestations of the spatial patterns of Indian capitalism. Specifically, the focus is on regions of agrarian structure (rent, petty production, and capitalist production and exchange relations) and regions of social identity (caste, ethnicity, and gender).

This paper is a review of the literature on agricultural commodity markets in India, in relation to the three vital roles these markets are thought to play. It outlines the strengths and limitations of each approach and shows how they contribute to our understanding of the workings of real markets. The paper also suggests a holistic view of markets, built on the basis of the insights of existing literature to enrich our knowledge of the complexity and diversity of real markets and assist realistic policymaking.

What we are seeing in India is not the classic agrarian transition. Poor Indians with homes in rural areas are no longer simple peasants or rural wage labourers. They are also dependent on migrant wage labour, on working in the rural non-farm economy and on petty commodity production and trade in the capitalist economy. This calls for revisiting the relevance of categories such as "poor peasant", "middle peasant", "rich peasant" by exploring the significance of the links that almost every single rural household seems to have (for its reproduction) with the wider economy beyond the village confines.

Tax collection is an important function of the state and is a prime source of revenue for any government. Quite often, the tax culture and social structures are such that they seem to encourage tax evasion. This paper examines commercial taxes and the role of the tax culture of social structures in Tamil Nadu and finds that while the state aims at ensuring tax compliance, it has unwittingly promoted a social structure that is "anti-tax" in nature. This has serious consequences for the distributional effects of taxation as well as for the accountability of the state to its people.

When the output of a product that forms the basis of subsistence and social reproduction - as rice is for Asia - expands, the marketed surplus rises disproportionately to the growth rate of production. This implies that activities that once formed part and parcel of household labour activity (performed by women - even if under the control of men) also become commercialised. Food security depends not only on the market, but also on the social and political structures within which markets are situated. One of these social structures is gender. Two aspects of this gendered process are explored in this essay, the first being 'productive deprivation'. Using field evidence from south Asia, the impact of technological change is shown to be strongly net labour displacing and strongly biased against female labour. At the same time, poverty ensures the persistence of petty commodity production, where women are either self-employed or 'unwaged' family workers. As seen in the case of rice production in West Bengal, growth in production has been accompanied by the displacement of women from the rice mill labour forces in which economies of scale have been pitched against unwaged work in petty production.