Rights are of various kinds-every day we read about people struggling somewhere in the world, for the right to free speech, for sexual rights, for the right to a minimum wage, or for the right to freedom of religion. These rights are indi-vidual rights. One can also have a right to a place in a university, not as an individual…
Whatever generalization you make about India, the reverse of it is equally true.Joan RobinsonAshok Mitra’s collection of sixty essays, published as column pieces in The Telegraph between 2009 and 2011, are self-confessedly quite disparate. The essay ‘A Country, Not a Nation’, however, gives an overall picture of the message that this book attempts to convey…
If we exclude the descriptive and institutional studies of the formal-legal variety, scholarship on legislative institutions in India would actually look threadbare. For a large number of students of Indian politics, obviously influenced by the behavioural revolution, institutions have simply not mattered. Consequently…
On August 15, 2011, while addressing India from the ramparts of the Red Fort, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the problem of corruption was ‘a difficultly for which no government has a magic wand’. To the extent that unclean hands include not only the greased palms in public offices but also those belonging to the citizens that do the greasing…
The Battle for Employment Guarantee is a collection of seminal articles that trace the genesis of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Gurantee Act (MGNREGA), evaluate its implemen-tation, and provide a commentary on the extent to which the Act has been successful in fulfilling the entitlements…
Divided into three parts, the twelve essays in this volume collectively emerge as a critique to the linear and often instrumentalist ‘developmental’ as well as ‘methodological’ perspective(s) of western modernity and its overwhelming hegemony across the Third World countries. They also deal with agencies and institutional structures working…