Articles by Pranab Bardhan

This article is based on a lecture delivered by the author to celebrate Kalyan Sanyal’s memory. It draws upon an email exchange between them on Sanyal’s book Rethinking Capitalist Development. It also dwells on the important issues that Sanyal raised with particular reference to India.

[An Open Letter to the Prime Minister on NREGA by economists based in India and elsewhere in the world.]

We are writing to express our deep concern about the future of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).

This paper uses two successive rounds of voter surveys in rural West Bengal in a household panel to find reasons for the recent decline in the Left Front's political popularity. It does not find evidence of any significant role of changes in voter age distribution, media exposure, private benefits received from development and welfare programmes administered by local governments, or the vote-generating effectiveness of such programmes. A more important role was played by voter dissatisfaction with local leaders on corruption and lack of involvement in the provision of education services, and with non-local leaders on attitudes towards women, the poor, and local communities.

In the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Left in India has not renewed itself. In the context of the electoral debacle in West Bengal and the defeat in Kerala, this article revisits the issue and asks, what future now for the Left in the country? The Left certainly has a role to play in India but to be able to do so it needs to pay attention to the many general issues that currently afflict it.

Substantial socio-economic changes have taken place in India in the last quarter century. This essay refl ects on the systemic implications of these changes from the point of view of the transition to an enlarged and dominating sphere of capital in the economy. There are a number of checks and balances and road bumps that will make the progress of capital in India halting and hesitant, and the democratic processes, however imperfect, will partly tame its brutalities. The Indian transition is thus bound to be rather tortuous, though in the long run inexorable, and its narrative will be more complex than usual.