In a homogenised imagination of human aspirations, development interventions replicate popular models, including intensive farming in Adivasi landscapes. In the process, they try to sedentarise and individualise Adivasi communities living in the forest peripheries. Even as modernisation remains an elusive target in most of the tribal belts, ethnic socio-ecological institutions become redundant, leaving the community deskilled — ecologically, socially, and economically. Adivasi’s concerns about this conventional development process entailing detribalisation are seldom deliberated in literature and among the community. 

Institutional births increased in India from 39% to 79% between 2005 and 2015. Drawing from 17 months of fieldwork, this article traces the shift from home to hospital births across three generations in a hamlet in Assam in Northeast India. Here, too, one finds that most births have shifted from home to hospital in less than a decade, aided by multiple factors. These include ​‘free’ birthing facilities and financial incentives offered by government schemes, idiosyncratic changes within the hamlet, such as the introduction of biomedical practices through home births where oxytocin was used, and changes in cultural belief systems among local people. The exploration reveals significant transitions between (and fluidities of) categories such as local/​global, tradition/​modernity, past/​present and nature/​technology, creating a complex and ambivalent narrative of change, in which the voices of mothers should not be ignored.

This case study is of ​“India’s First Fully Solar Powered Village”2 — Dharnai. It is a case of the promises of and challenges facing the realisation of ​“energy democracy” — the idea that distributed renewable energy systems have the potential to democratise the economy and society.

Constitutional measures to ensure fair compensation and livelihood security to the land losing refugees of development processes, overlook the complexity of ​‘public purpose’ — the dominant rationale behind operationalizing ​‘eminent domain’ of the state. Popular perception of public purpose as urbanization muffles the de facto social citizenship around plural values of agricultural landscapes. Ignoring the enduring public purposes served by agrarian landscapes aids in underestimating the longterm welfare impacts on displaced farmers.

This working paper studied individual religiosity, trust, and trustworthiness to find that more religious people are more likely to exhibit greater trustworthiness even if religiosity does not predict trust.

This article discusses an intervention for rehabilitation of female survivors of violence that reconceptualises rehabilitation through a feminist lens: the Sampoornata model of Dance Movement Therapy (DMT), which has been created and is being practiced by an NGO called Kolkata Sanved in Kolkata, India. Feminist rehabilitation is seen as a perspective which, in contrast to dominant rehabilitation praxis, recognises that individual experiences of violence are embedded in patriarchal social structures and aims for survivors to internalise a sense of agency by deconstructing internalised patriarchal norms that legitimise violence against women and girls and stigmatisation of survivors. The article highlights how Sampoornata enacts feminist rehabilitation through the medium of the body. Survivors reclaim the body from patriarchal control and reflect on the embodied experience in order to question patriarchal norms, remove self-blame, and negotiate a space for themselves within society.

This working paper studied farmers’ perspectives on their future as beneficiaries of wastewater (domestic sewage with industrial effluents) generated in the Vrishabhavathy watershed of Bengaluru city.

Modern India has a history of a vibrant and active social sector. Many local development organisations, community organisations, social movements and non-governmental organisations populate the space of social action. Such organisations imagine a different future and plan and implement social interventions at different scales, many of which have lasting impact on the lives of people and society. However, their efforts and, more importantly, the learning from these initiatives remains largely unknown not only in the public sphere but also in the worlds of ​‘development practice’ and ​‘development education’. This shortfall impedes the process of learning and growth across interventions, organisations and time.