Articles by Jan Breman

Migrant workers, who are often landless labourers, seek succour and refuge in night shelters mandated by the Supreme Court of India.

Land fl ight from the fl ood-prone Sindh countryside in Pakistan is becoming increasingly widespread, driven by a feudal agrarian regime which has millions of land-poor peasants bound in debt and servitude and by rising population pressure on agrarian resources. Together these make sharecropping and rural labour extremely unviable sources of livelihood. This article looks at the agrarian crisis and the proletarianisation of the peasantry stuck halfway between the countryside and the city.

In the four and a half years of its existence the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector submitted nine reports exploring a variety of conditions in India's "unorganised" sector. It is not surprising that the analyses and recommendations of these reports have been ignored by the government, for they call attention to the urgent need to address the inequality and non-inclusiveness in India's growth process. A refl ection on the NCEUS' reports, in particular the last report of the commission on the challenge of employment.

The agendas of the transnational institutions with a mandate to steer the global economy may focus on combating poverty, but in the neoclassical policies that lie behind them the increasingly vocal message is that the poor masses mainly have themselves to blame for their plight. Deprivation and subordination have not yet been transformed into a policy of systematic exclusion. But the idea seems to have been revived that it is not poverty itself but the impoverished human material that suffers from it that represent an unacceptable burden for the better-off of the world.

At the Bottom of the Urban Economy City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty by Ananya Roy; published as Volume 10 in the series Globalisation and Community , University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003; pp 352, $ 22.95 (paperback).