Articles by Sanjay Kumar

The attempt to reform the electoral system is a welcome move. However, the current proposals on candidates' disclosures of various kinds do not appear to be well-constructed and the bill includes ambiguities which are open to misinterpretation. It is perhaps more important immediately to strengthen the system of preparing electoral rolls and allowing public access to them.

The difference in the proportion of votes polled by the Congress which won a majority of seats in the assembly and the BJP which came a poor second is small enough to prompt a more serious inquiry into the voting behaviour of the electorate in this new state.

Forest planners and forest departments have long ignored local ecological services provided by forests, of which forest communities, have knowledge of, and on which the economic, social and political life of the area is dependent. Joint Forest Management (JFM) is restricted to management of forests as providers of forest and non-timber forest products. This paper investigates in detail the extensive indigenous knowledge of such local ecological services among a forest community. It argues that local ecological services are the missing link in designing plans for successful decentralisation and sustainable management of forests. Enlisting such local knowledge, as is done in this paper, is the first step to incorporating it in the management of forests.

Civil Society in Society SANJAY KUMAR Articles by Gurpreet Mahajan (1999a, 1999b) and Andre Beteille (1999) have done well to initiate a discussion on civil society and its relationship to democracy, state and citizenship. However, both these authors discuss civil society and associated concepts only as normative ideals of the liberal ideology and do not situate them in concrete social contexts. From the perspective of their ideology they decry what does not approach their ideal, but their presentations have little explanatory significance as they are of no help in understanding the way things are. The various avatars of civil society discussed by Mahajan are varied meanings that different authors ranging from a liberal Locke to third world Marxists have attributed to this term. The real avatars of civil society are, however, not these different meanings, but actual civil societies that have emerged world over with the spread of liberal ideology and polity. That different social contexts would give rise to different types of civil societies, which again would be interpreted differently by different authors, is completely missed by Mahajan.

While the NFHS was conducted with the primary objective of collecting data on reproductive status, it has generated considerable data on caste and economic conditions. An analysis of this data set shows that there are wide differentials in the economic conditions of the socially backward castes and classes. This raises vital questions on the role and relevance of caste-based privileges.