Articles by Manabi Majumdar

Jos Mooij, associate professor and deputy rector for educational affairs at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), the Hague, Holland, breathed her last on 28 February 2013 very prematurely.

imparting to its readers a sense of the Indian national movement as an internally connected (however loosely), pan-Indian organic political phenomenon. Instead the volume gives the impression of a multitude of anti-imperialist struggles launched in different parts of the country in which the local grievances and spontaneity played the most important role. These struggles are seen to be connected to each other because they happened to be fought against the same enemy, the British government. That these struggles may have had an all- India apex; were fostered by a set of ideas and an ideology; that there was an organisation with a leadership which had a sense of strategy, are all ideas that seem very alien to the volume under review. It succeeds in highlighting the

Set within the larger debate linking taxation with representation, the paper takes a close look at "face-to-face", i e, local government taxation in two districts of West Bengal and asks who pays and why, in situations when tax amounts are nominal. Drawing on statistical analysis, citizen survey and ethnographic research, the paper claims that while people's relative prosperity, not unexpectedly, has a positive effect on their tax contributions, even poorer social groups such as the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes may pay up, driven by a complex mix of motivations ranging from compulsion to contingent compliance. The paper concludes that as gram panchayats begin to rely more on local tax incomes, greater is the probability for a "fiscal contract" to emerge between local taxpayers and an accountable local government.

with much social and cultural capital re- Educational Regimes in quired to convert educational skills into Contemporary India employment opportunities. Can they and edited by Radhika Chopra and do they get by, in adult lives, with their Patricia Jeffery in collaboration with almost minimal experience of schooling, Helmut Reifeld; especially in a situation where there are many educational regimes and where Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2005; schools themselves are socio-economically pp 346, Rs 380 (paperback).

Focusing on variations in secondary schooling across the states of Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, this paper makes the claims that we need to deal with the challenges of universal elementary education and the expansion of secondary schooling simultaneously, rather than in a gradual sequence. Except in a few educationally forward regions of the country, secondary participation remains highly restrictive because, a majority of young people ? in particular from deprived communities ? do not have access to secondary education. Decisions regarding virtually all school related activities are concentrated at the state level, to the relative neglect of sub-state level and school level actors. Vocational secondary education and ?skilling? of adolescents have always received step-motherly policy attention. Interestingly, however, in the majority of the sample states, aided schools seem to have become reasonably accessible to disadvantaged groups, in sharp contrast to unaided schools. Hence there is a case for strengthening aided schools, as a potentially effective means of narrowing the gaps between the privileged youth and their disadvantaged peers.