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 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.

Yellow foot Clam (Paphia malabarica) fishery of the Ashtamudi lake, one of the deepest lakes in Kerala supports the livelihoods of thousands of clam-collectors in the region. These clams are highly demanded in the international market and it enables the clam-collectors to generate their income through export began in late 80s. An increased export market demand exerted a lot of pressure on the resource which ultimately led to the depletion of clam resources. As a response to this unexpected decline in resource size and lost income, the clam collector community in Ashtamudi came forward to address the issue by forming a collective of clam-collectors at the village level. As a management strategy, they voluntarily abstained from fishing during the breeding season and demanded management of resource through a participatory mode of governance. After years of experience in the management of resource through voluntary measures, Ashtamudi clam resource entered a new régime of resource management. It got certified as ​“sustainable” resource by the world’s largest marine wild-catch certification program, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) which promotes the governance of marine fisheries resources through market incentives. This study is an attempt to understand these varied and unique governance régime experiences of clam resource from participatory to market-based systems and the implications of these governance regimes in the property rights, livelihoods and social development of clam-collectors of Ashtamudi.

This paper examines Manipur’s census statistics for the period between 1991 and 2011. It argues that conventional demographic factors cannot explain the abnormal population growth rates reported in parts of Manipur and that the abnormalities in the headcount might instead be explained by the manipulation of census data driven by political and economic considerations. Manipur’s experience is used to draw attention to systemic problems related to the inadequacy of metadata supplied by the Census of India, the lack of guidelines for the correction of census data, the impact of political interference on data quality and the cascading effect of errors in fundamental statistics such as headcount on other government statistics.

Recent work on informal urbanism argues that ​‘informality’ is a strong force in determining and shaping how cities in the global south grow, and hence needs to be a part of emergent urban theory. This paper uses this argument as a starting point, drawing upon the work of scholars who suggest that urban informality may have an organizing logic, a system of norms that emerge from the economic conditions and the social needs of people. Specifically, this paper examines informality in the urban space as an outcome of spatial and economic changes in a market precinct in Bangalore. It finds that activities in the street are temporal in nature. In this paper, the ordinary city encapsulates how people use urban spaces on an everyday basis and the extraordinary city reflects how urban spaces are transformed during a periodic, religious and cultural festival. The paper makes two key contributions, one, to show through an in-depth spatial ethnographic study how the ​‘ordinary – extraordinary’ might help us understand informal urbanism and two, to propose that it may be useful to have intermediate levels of planning that incorporate the conditions of the ​‘ordinary’ city as well as the ​‘extraordinary’ city, thereby contributing to both theory and practice.

While India has made progress in achieving important health sector goals, there is still a long way to go. The Government of India has adopted decentralization or devolution with the objective of promoting greater equity and supporting people-centred, responsive health systems. We report on a study that problematizes the idea of strengthening health sector governance through decentralization and that explores the intersection of the political goal of enhanced local-level autonomy and the programmatic goal of more responsive health service delivery. The study examines the extent to which both political and programmatic decentralization are functional at the village level; looks at the design and objectives of decentralization at the village level; and considers whether sustained and supportive capacity building can create the necessary conditions for more genuine de facto decentralization and empowerment of village-level functionaries. Our methodology included semi-structured interviews with village-level functionaries in two districts of Karnataka, based on which we designed an Action Research to strengthen coordination and synergy between the functionaries responsible for political and programmatic decentralization. We found that both political and programmatic decentralization at the village level are at risk due to a lack of convergence between the political and programmatic arms of the government. This is substantially due to problems inherent in the design of the decentralization mechanism at the district level and below. Sustained capacity building can contribute to the more effective application of decentralization mechanisms, but systemic issues regarding the decentralization mechanisms need to be addressed alongside. We were also able to identify some spaces where coordination between village-level functionaries is possible, and the steps that need to be taken to build on this potential.

Most discussions on the quality of government data overlook the legal framework within which data are collected. This paper examines India’s Census Act, 1948, which provides the legal-administrative framework for conducting human population census. The Act stipulates punishment for interfering with the process of enumeration, but the punitive provisions are rarely used and have not been invoked to deal with cases of mass manipulation of the census. Major instances of manipulation were, in fact, reported in 1951 and 2001 after the government introduced additional punitive measures in 1948 and 1994, respectively. This paper compares the Census Act, 1948 with other Indian laws related to the collection of statistics as well as census laws of other common law countries and identifies the structural flaws of the Indian law vis-à-vis manipulation. It uses simple games to explain why the punitive provisions of the Census Act, 1948 are redundant in the event of mass manipulation and suggests that the problem can be addressed without recourse to law. The insights drawn from the games are examined in light of the experience of Nagaland, a state of India where census statistics were manipulated on a large scale in 2001.

Despite economic debacles, recurring ​“accidents”, reactor core meltdowns in Chernobyl and Fukushima and the cautious academic reflection it has engendered, civilian nuclear power continues to enjoy legitimacy in energy policy discourse. This may not be the case in all countries. But it is so in a number of influential states, such as, prominently, all the permanent members of the UN Security Council. Why does nuclear power persist in these and other key countries, such as India or Iran and Japan? How is it that economic costs, technology risks and weapons proliferation concerns point in one direction while energy policy and technology choice moves in the other? We suggest that for an important set of select countries this divergence can be ascribed to a ​“discourse of power” that is pegged to domestic concerns and, more importantly, to international relations. This discursive process constructs energy and material abundance as the cornerstone of social stability, political power and ultimately national sovereignty and geopolitical influence. The atom’s energy remains prominent in such imaginaries of abundance, more so in contexts of fossil energy insecurity and climate change. The questioning then of nuclear power by environmental and social concerns has to also question this discourse of power. The latter’s sanguinity vis-a-vis abundant energy needs to be problematised. This is not the case today in international relations. Practitioners focus on the consequences of environmental deterioration. The problem of climate refugees, for example. This paper argues that realist frames of power and self-interest in international relations be acknowledged explicitly as drivers of the discourse of power and in turn the socio-ecological consequences that ensue from this pursuit of cheap and abundant energy. To challenge nuclear power ultimately is to also challenge this medieval yet dominant norm of power play that pervades large swathes of international relations.

There is no globally established standard for measuring malnutrition among children aged 5 – 18 years. Growth references are used as a standard but there are many limitations to using such references to assess nutritional status of Indian children. As per the World Health Organization, standards and references both serve as a basis for comparison, but each enables a different interpretation. A standard defines how children should grow; and deviations from the pattern it prescribes are evidence of abnormal growth. A reference, on the other hand, does not provide a basis for such value judgments, although in practice, references often are mistakenly used as standards. This paper has conducted a methodological review of prevalence of malnutrition from openly accessible literature pertaining to assessment of nutritional status of school-going children in India from the year 2000 to 2016. The methodological review reveals that a combination of different national and international references have been used in assessing nutritional status of Indian children. International references includes NCHS 1977, CDC 2000, WHO 2007, IOTF 2012 extended Body Mass Index (BMI) cut- offs, Gomez classification, Waterlow’s classification and national references such as — Agarwal standards, ICMR reference values, IAP reference and BMI cut-off for overweight & obesity of Indian children. A new national growth reference has been recently developed by Marwaha and others (2011) for BMI, but no assessment of nutritional status using this reference was found. Each of these methods was then applied to a database containing height, weight, age and sex of 5340 school-going children. Though there are three nutritional indicators for school-age children, majority of the study conducted used only BMI chart to assess nutritional status. Therefore BMI-for-age is considered for the analysis to i) understand the methodological application of the above growth references ii) compare the differences in nutritional status and iii) recommend an appropriate growth reference (from those available) to assess the nutritional status of Indian school-age children. The literature review also reveals that malnutrition among school-age children is prevalent in India. There is no national level data available to support this judgement across regions, gender and caste. Given a likely high prevalence of malnutrition, this paper calls for the development of a growth standard to measure malnutrition among school-age children in India. Though this paper is focused on malnutrition, it simultaneously provides similar importance to over growth. A growth Standard therefore fills up such gaps in measuring double burden of malnutrition i.e. under-nutrition and over-nutrition.

Cities of the Global South are expanding both spatially and demographically. While urbanization may contribute to economic growth and employment generation, the impacts of urbanization on sustainability of cities is manifold. One area that is witnessing rapid land use change as a result of urbanization is the peri-urban interface of cities in India. This is especially true in the case of natural spaces that are also common pool resources. In this working paper, we examine the transformation of lakes in the peri-urban interface of Bengaluru city in the south Indian state of Karnataka. Based on GPS observations and interviews, we found that lakes in our study area varied in status and use: ranging from those in a good condition that served multiple uses to those converted to other forms of land use, resulting in loss of all services. We also accessed archival information to underscore the role that one of the lakes in the study area played in serving as a source of water during a time of scarcity. Using the example of lakes in Bengaluru, this paper presents the threats faced by commons in the peri-urban interface of rapidly expanding cities in the Global South. These threats are not restricted to changes to land use alone, but also concern their transformation into recreational sites at the cost of users who depend on them for livelihood and subsistence. We argue for management of the lakes in the peri-urban interface not only as ecosystems that supports ecological and economic uses, but as commons that are a reflection of the diversity and heterogeneity that cities such as Bengaluru represent.

Sample surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) are the most widely used sources of household level information about consumption, employment, and other socio-economic indicators in India. The representativeness of samples, the wide range of topics surveyed, and the availability of a long-time series are some of the reasons for the appeal of NSSO data for research and policy. This paper assesses the quality of the NSSO data for Nagaland and Jammu and Kashmir, which lie in India’s politically restive ethno-geographical periphery. It argues that the NSSO data for these states during 1973 – 2014 lack representativeness and inter-temporal comparability due to faulty sampling frames, frame and sample non-coverage, and biased samples. It quantifies the impact of data quality on statistics of interest to policy-makers. The paper shows that the estimates of monthly per capita consumption expenditure (MPCE) are sensitive to non-coverage and argues that the incidence of poverty is underestimated because NSSO surveys failed to capture the complete distribution of consumption expenditure due to non-coverage. In Nagaland, the degree of non-coverage was so high that in most years between 1993 – 94 and 2011-12 the state’s poverty headcount ratio was the lowest in the country despite the possible overestimation of its poverty line. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the use of non-representative survey data. Put together, the unreliability of government statistics in Jammu and Kashmir and Nagaland highlights systemic problems that have wider implications for our understanding of the relationship between state, statistics, and policy-making.

This paper explores the construction of hybrid spaces through the observation of middle school children engaged in short science projects in an informal science learning programme. Hybrid spaces are not just physical structures, but refer to contexts, relationships and knowledges developed by children as their social worlds and identities merge with the normative expectations of school science. Hybrid spaces have been characterised in three different ways: as a convergent space between academic and traditionally marginalized knowledges and discourses; as a navigational space, or a way of crossing and succeeding in different discourse communities; and as a space of cultural, social and epistemological change where competing knowledges and discourses challenge and reshape both academic and everyday knowledges. (Moje et al., 2004; Barton et al., 2008). This paper characterises such hybrid paces by analysing activities of children working on short projects in the broad area of: ​‘Trees, plants and insects’, during a summer camp held at the Azim Premji University. Children seemed to primarily use the ​‘third space’ to navigate between different funds of knowledge and succeed in science. They developed science artefacts such as scrapbooks and a children’s magazine, and negotiated new roles for participating and expressing their developing science identities. They also brought in local knowledge and activities from their home contexts such as gardening, cooking and socialisation with members of their own and wider community. Informal settings help in the negotiation, construction and development of these hybrid spaces, and is particularly meaningful for children who otherwise see science as being alien and outside their everyday lives. Children brought different funds of knowledge into their participation and discussions from both their formal and informal experiences linked to science. Children decided their own trajectory of learning experiences in consultation with the facilitator. This paper also describes various possibilities in informal settings and learning experiences within and outside formal school settings, which help children explore and engage more deeply with their developing interests in science.

This working paper will focus on conceptualising why informal labour continues to persist in the Indian economy. More specifically, it will try to theorise why, despite generating growth, informal labour has been locked in unequal and exploitative terms of contracts. Crucially, it will try to understand why informal labour processes do not evolve mechanisms for providing security and support to labour in the form of benefits and rights. In this paper, I will focus specifically on highly exploitative and unequal informal labour processes. I categorise under this category those labour processes that do not provide a mechanism to reproduce labour power. These processes are predicated on maximising the appropriation of surplus from labour, without providing any provision to support the workers in ill health, facing work related accidents and injuries, or due to retrenchment. While informal labour is defined as labour without legal rights or contracts, I specifically focus on those processes where there do not exist any norms or mechanisms of providing security to labour within the production process. Hence, I refer to these processes as highly exploitative and unequal labour processes. This paper will be structured in the following manner. Firstly, it will introduce the concept of labour process and argue that highly exploitative informal labour processes in India broadly fall into two distinct labour processes namely: informal coercive accumulation process and petty commodity production. It will then derive concepts from the Paris Regulation School to modify the labour process framework. It will then describe concrete case studies conducted by other researchers, to demonstrate that this framework can be utilised to make sense of field work based research on the informal sector. Lastly, I will assess the questions posed in this paper based on the derived framework and will argue that informality is connected to the nature of capitalist development in India.

The quality of education depends largely upon the teacher. Hence building teacher capacity through continuous professional development of teachers is critical to the quality of education. Systems and programs for continuous professional development for school teachers in the formal educational system in India are inadequate and often ill-conceived. Apart from other lacunae, they often do not recognize the professional identity and agency of the teacher. Voluntary Teacher Forums (VTFs) that are facilitated by Azim Premji Foundation in different locations of India, as part of an integrated and multimodal approach to continuous professional development, try to address this central issue. This study shows that VTFs are evolving as very useful platforms for collaboration and peer learning amongst teachers in various locations. It shows that given an environment that allows for easy access to meaningful opportunities, teachers will commit their time, talents and resources to their own professional development. The study further recognizes however, that the real issue is to understand how such forums can be made to happen in different locations in a context as complex as the Indian public education system. While this study highlights certain crucial dimensions of the VTFs – including what happens within these forums and the efforts that go behind it – these continue to be subjects for our future research works.

Economic reforms sought to replace the Indian statedominant economy with a liberal, competitive market economy. However, a plethora of recent scams indicate that collusive rentsharing arrangements between business and policy makers are prevalent. A nexus has developed, linking politicians and business, as well as the bureaucracy. These trends signal a breakdown of competitive markets and the accumulation of wealth via corruption. This paper explains crony capitalism within a framework of interaction between four stakeholder groups whose motives and behaviour have altered in the recent context. These are political executives, political parties, business entities and the bureaucracy. Using the coal mine block allocation controversy as a case study, we examine the modus operandi of crony capitalism as a capture of the policy process. We examine the limitations of the present corrective political and legal processes. 

The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for curbing crony capitalism via reform of : 

(a) the political funding system,
(b) the policy process,
© the audit institution and
(d) the business environment

Empirical research in economics and, to a lesser extent, in other social sciences is largely dependent upon government statistics. It is generally assumed that governments are committed to collecting and disseminating correct statistics. As a result, the mutually constitutive relationship between politics, economy, and statistics, and the possibility of systematic manipulation of statistics-driven by the structural features of this relationship, has received insufficient attention within economics. This paper examines the implications of the absence of shared preferences over the quality of statistics within a government. It explores the multiplicity of conflicting maps of the State of Nagaland issued by different tiers and wings of the government to underscore the lack of attention paid to a statistic as crucial as area. The paper situates the cartographic-statistical confusion in its political and economic contexts, and suggests that political-geographic arguments are being used to advance political-economic interests along contested borders. It argues that the confusion is not amenable to a technical resolution as it is linked to the dispute over Nagaland’s place within the Union of India and the border disputes between Nagaland and its neighbouring states.