Articles by Ratan Khasnabis

India is yet to achieve the goal of universalisation of elementary education or 100 per cent enrolment and retention of children with schooling facilities in all habitations. Despite the government's attempt to achieve this goal through the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, which has a special focus on girl children, students belonging to disadvantaged families still do not attend classes regularly. This paper examines various reasons for poor attendance behaviour of students in formal schools. On the basis of a study in the eastern slums of Kolkata, it finds that retaining the students in a formal school is far more difficult than enrolling them, particularly if the students are from very poor economic backgrounds.

Study of 'Rationalised' Workers in Durgapur Ratan Khasnabis Sudipti Banerjea The article explores the mechanisms behind the workers' acceptance of voluntary retirement scheme in the Durgapur industrial area of West Bengal. Though there is willingness on the part of the workers to accept the compensation in some cases, there are sizeable number of instances of coercion from the management forcing the workers to accept the deal. More importantly, the amount of VRS gets mostly utilised for non-productive purposes, thus reducing the chances of the retired workers to begin any self-employment venture.

More on West Bengal Tenancy Reforms Ratan Khasnabis IN his paper 'Sharecropping in West Bengal: From Independence to Operation Bagra' [1], Biplab Dasgupta examines some of the criticisms on the tenancy reform measures of the Left Front government which I raised in an earlier paper [2]. Dasgupta comments thay my 'criticism reveals a complete lack of understanding of what the Left Front government was seeking to achieve through these land reform measures' (I, P A-87). According to Dasgupta, this 'lack of understanding' originates in our failure to appreciate that the Left Front is not aiming at abolition of tenancy; it is aiming at the limited goal of recording the tenancy right of the bargadars.

The findings of a survey of tenurial arrangements in Nadia district of West Bengal, reported here, reveal that tenurial arrangements were associated with backward production conditions. A typical tenant did not take up the new agricultural strategy; cost-sharing as an investment proposition was also missing from the pattern of behaviour of the landlords. A non-legalised sharecropping arrangement that assures a high share of the produce for the landowners, wielding semi-feudal authority over the tenants in a near stagnant agrarian economy, is the typical reality with respect to the observed house- holds. No neat model on the lines of differential risk aversion, or varying bargaining power of individual lessors and lessees, seems to he applicable to such an economy.