The need to strengthen comprehensive primary health care towards ensuring ​“Health for All” is well established yet operationalising this has remained a challenge globally as well as in India. Based on a qualitative study of a collaborative initiative between the government and a civil society organisation, this article discusses what factors and processes explain successful implementation of primary health care in a remote rural area in central India.

Authors: Arima Mishra, Raman Kataria, Roseline Sagar, Pawan Singh, Pankaj Tiwari, Shivkant Tripathi, Vinay Vishwakarma, Sapna Mishra

Mental health is a global priority, fundamental to the health and development of all nations. The contribution of mental disorders to the global burden of disease is widely recognised; however, a significant care gap exists, particularly in the context of low-and middle-income countries. In India, for instance, there are 0.3 psychiatrists per 1,00,000 population. To address this severe shortage of mental health professionals and resources globally, the World Health Organisation has suggested the adoption of a community-based mental health care approach, where the locus of services shifts from institutional care to local communities. Over the last five decades in India, diverse approaches to mental health care have emerged because of the interaction of dominant discourses on community-based mental health care with various socio-cultural contexts. In addition to the government-run mental health programme and programmes run by medical colleges, civil society organisations have increasingly contributed to this space. Although studies have assessed individual interventions, there exists a need to map these interventions and synthesise the approaches for service delivery to inform public health practice in India and in low-and middle-income countries at large. This narrative review attempts to map and synthesise insights from community-based mental health interventions in India implemented across diverse contexts. The researchers searched peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters published in the English language between 2010 and 2023. They present the synthesis of approaches used in 41 community-based mental health interventions, where they unpack key intervention components and processes adopted for primary prevention and promotion; identification and case detection; treatment and care, and rehabilitation in the community. This review presents key recommendations for practitioners about the role of community, the diversity and commonalities in various approaches across contexts, the roles of various actors in service delivery, and the shared values guiding the conceptualisation and implementation of community-based mental health interventions in India.

The increasing global demand for food, coupled with the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation, has shifted attention towards blue food systems. While these systems offer a potential solution to food security challenges, their sustainability is threatened by various factors, including overfishing, habitat destruction, and climate change. Recognising these challenges, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO, UN) advocates for ensuring the sustainable contribution of aquatic food systems to global food security and nutrition, aligning with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs). It was hypothesised that adoption of UN-SDGs would increase the interest of researchers in sustainability of fisheries and aquaculture. Therefore, a bibliometric analysis of the relevant literature published between 2000 and 2023 was conducted to test this hypothesis. The analysis revealed a significant rise in publications addressing climate change and sustainability after the adoption of the UN-SDGs. The countries exhibiting high vulnerability to climate change contributed disproportionately fewer publications to the database. The United States emerged as the leading contributor in terms of publication volume, while Canada’s University of British Columbia was identified as the institution with the highest number of contributing authors. The findings underscore pronounced geographical disparities in research output, with a predominance of countries from the Global North. The underlying factors contributing to these disparities are discussed. Furthermore, the study discusses the policy implications of these findings and emphasises the imperative to prioritise equitable research initiatives. Such efforts are essential to effectively support the realisation of the SDGs within the domain of blue food systems and sustainability.

The Indian economy, despite registering high growth, is characterised by a persistent and vast informal economy. Using it as an illustration, the researchers draw lessons for characterising labour markets in contexts of high informality. They employ a group-based statistical modelling method to identify whether there exist systematic patterns in the high volume of worker transitions across different employment arrangements. Using panel data for eight points between 2017 and 2019, they identify seven dominant labour market trajectories. The trajectory capturing stable formal salaried employment, with highest average earnings, accounts for only 6.7% of the sample. None of the dominant trajectories denote a job ladder from informal to formal work, and the sorting of individuals into informal trajectories is far from voluntary, indicating an existence of formal and informal segmentation. The most populous trajectory, comprising 38.4% of the sample, with second highest average income (although half of that of the formal salaried trajectory), is stable self-employment, followed by the trajectory representing transition within different forms of informal wage work at 27.2%. Most trajectory groups associated with informal wage arrangements have high flux, indicating lack of stability. Furthermore, trajectories associated with informal wage employment have even lower earnings than those with informal self-employment. Far from suggesting a desirability of informal self-employment, this is indicative of a breaking down of the expected voluntary transition from self to wage employment in the transformation process. Additionally, access to trajectories is stratified along various correlates, especially caste. Caste hierarchy operates most starkly at the node of accessing the trajectories, while in terms of penalties or gains in earnings, traditional caste-hierarchy may not always operate uniformly. The findings disrupt the standard expectation in structural transformation models and labour market theories, while highlighting the need to foreground evolving nature of informality in labour market models for developing economies.

Authors: Rosa Abraham, Surbhi Kesar

This article presents a historical account of emergence and development of the territorial power of Jats in Punjab through analysing three elements. First, their historical appropriation of the village as their agrarian territory, which was often perpetuated under the discourse of ​‘village community’/clans and the monopolisation of the peasant identity. Second, the often-benevolent administration in Punjab during the colonial rule. Third, the development of a discourse of caste-progressiveness of Jats. The Punjab experience in this regard is significant to understand similar processes in other states and to make appropriate strategies for social movements and policy advocacy regarding agrarian/​social reforms.

Résumé

Cet article présente un compte rendu historique de l’émergence et du développement du pouvoir territorial des Jats au Pendjab en analysant trois éléments. Premièrement, leur appropriation historique du village en tant que territoire agraire, qui s’est souvent perpétuée sous le discours de la « communauté villageoise »/​clans et de la monopolisation de l’identité paysanne. Deuxièmement, l’administration souvent bénévole du Pendjab pendant la période coloniale. Troisièmement, le développement d’un discours sur la progressivité de la caste des Jats. L’expérience du Pendjab à cet égard est importante pour comprendre des processus similaires dans les autres États et pour élaborer des stratégies appropriées pour les mouvements sociaux et le plaidoyer politique concernant les réformes agraires/​sociales.

Reflecting a longstanding intellectual heritage in Marxist political economy, contributions to agrarian studies have variously referred to the production, distribution and extraction of value. Despite this central role within the heritage of agrarian studies, the concept of value is often used inconsistently between authors and sometimes deployed without clear elucidation of the underlying theoretical tenets. As such, value often tends to be used more as a metaphor suggestive of conditions of exploitation rather than a detailed conceptual framework. In response, we must ask if there is still a robust case for value analysis forming a foundational pillar of agrarian studies? To address this challenging question, we invited three authors to give their perspective on the value of value for agrarian studies. First and foremost, we asked them to consider what value analysis does that is otherwise missed in critical agrarian studies and how we can mobilise its potential to sharpen analyses. Two further pivotal questions arise, spurred on by recent trends in the literature. First, to what extent do the categories of value enrich or hinder our evolving understanding of the dynamics of social reproduction within agrarian households and communities, including the gendered relations through which agriculture and livelihoods are performed? Similarly, are the largely anthropogenic concepts of value fit for the purpose of explaining environmental change and the more-than-human dynamics through which agricultural landscapes are produced and change over time?

Authors: A Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Srishti Yadav, Alessandra Mezzadri, Marcus Taylor

This article aims to understand the methodological position that Marx takes in Capital Volume 1 and the implications of that on the individual units in his analysis. With the understanding that Marx adopts a fundamentally holist methodological standpoint, the article outlines how the individuals within classes and the system of capitalist production are measured and contextualised. This question is answered by examining Marx’s Capital Volume 1 as the primary text. Where relevant, the researcher engages with Marx’s intellectual background and tradition. The individual units discussed in this study are the commodity, the worker and the capitalist.

This article examines how the concept of the representative individual emerges through averaging and how this process unfolds in Marx’s Capital, shaped by his methodological approach. The article illustrates the method of averaging in Marx, through his intellectual engagement with Quetelet as it also focuses on Hegel’s influence on Marx’s method and elaborates on the parallels and divergences between them. With the given engagement with Capital and Marx’s intellectual interactions, the researcher arrives at a specific understanding of holism that can be attributed to Marx in Capital Volume 1.

Author: Sushmita Rama Subrahmanyam, Student, MA in Economics (2024−2026)

This article aims to understand the methodological position that Marx takes in Capital Volume 1 and the implications of that on the individual units in his analysis. With the understanding that Marx adopts a fundamentally holist methodological standpoint, the article outlines how the individuals within classes and the system of capitalist production are measured and contextualised. This question is answered by examining Marx’s Capital Volume 1 as the primary text. Where relevant, the author engages with Marx’s intellectual background and tradition. The individual units discussed in this study are the commodity, the worker and the capitalist.

This article examines how the concept of the representative individual emerges through averaging and how this process unfolds in Marx’s Capital, shaped by his methodological approach. The article illustrates the method of averaging in Marx, through his intellectual engagement with Quetelet as it also focusses on Hegel’s influence on Marx’s method and elaborates on the parallels and divergences between them. With the given engagement with Capital and Marx’s intellectual interactions, we arrive at a specific understanding of holism that can be attributed to Marx in Capital Volume 1.

Author: Sushmita Rama Subrahmanyam

“Global learning crisis” narratives, in focusing on the ​“proximate determinants” of the crisis, represent a welcome ​“classroom turn” in international education and development. Extant learning crisis literatures are problematic, however, as their homogenizing gaze distorts how teachers and students co-constitute classrooms as locally meaningful learning spaces. Drawing on anthropological approaches in comparative education, this article addresses the ​“learning crisis” in a middle-school classroom in a weavers’ neighborhood in Kanchipuram. Constituted in an elaborate ​“notebook economy,” this classroom was an inventive response that not only accommodated students’ material cultures and social-educational disadvantages but also affected their belonging in a resource-scarce public education system. If the learning it afforded was disdained in ​“learning crisis” narratives, it was nevertheless relevant for students, readily translated into educationally unintensive assembly-line jobs. In producing contempt for such classrooms, ​“learning crisis” narratives merely distract from — and thus entrench — the deeply unequal economic and educational development that necessitated the notebook economy in the first place.