economic development

The COVID-19 crisis provides an opportunity to reorient the existing methods and methodologies for data construction. Such a move will also help gradually transit from a data deficit to a data-driven and empirical economic policymaking.

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India by Mytheli Sreenivas, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021; pp 274, `2,250.

Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers and Policies edited by Alistair Dieppe, Washington, DC: World Bank (Advance Edition), 2020; pp xxiii + 389, price not indicated

In colonial times, universities were established in India to produce graduates who would serve the interests of a colonial ruling elite. Fast-forwarding to the present times, India is witnessing a massification of higher education, with the establishment of more universities and an increase in enrolment. Under such circumstances, what merits examination is whether universities are producing knowledge for knowledge’s sake, or training individuals to fall in line with a neo-liberal nationalist agenda of economic development.

Ahmedabad, once a city known for its enterprise, is now a city whose various communities live lives defined by the communal space. The ascendancy of the communal space, however, has coincided with the global integration of its economy. This paper analyses how the city, its physical and socio-economic structure, responded to the needs of globalisation. The increasingly uncertain economic base of the city left self-employed and casual workers vulnerable to the vagaries of market forces. In the vacuum created by the exclusion of certain sections of the city's population from development programmes and as local governments abstained from their welfare responsibilities, an opportunity was created for the Sangh parivar to step in with its vicious propaganda, fomenting hatred and creating an identifiable, though false, image of the 'other'.