A large section of the literature analysing the global value chains and global production networks have remained restricted to the analysis of production processes: their organizational structures, nature and character of the variety of governance systems of the value chains as well as the technological arrangements around the same.
For over a decade now, the field of labour geography, or the analysis of how industrial relations are shaped by and in turn shape the spaces that they are played out in, has become an important one in understanding contemporary capitalist industrial and labour processes.
India’s high growth has continued hand in-hand with rising inequality, and almost unchanged absolute level of poverty despite its falling incidence. A lot has been written about multi-dimensional measures of poverty, its impact on growth, its geographical location, its concentration among certain socio-economic groups, and about its causes and possible remedies.
The caste system in India has always been an instrument of exploitation and social discrimination for appropriating surpluses in the process of production and exchange. Though the policy makers in India proudly claim it as (one of) the biggest functioning democracies in the world and had declared untouchability as illegal immediately after Independence…
Karnataka has acquired a name for itself in recent times for decentralization, local governance and improvements in the social sectors. The State is also known for land reforms and the political assertion of backward castes, influenced by Lohiates, and all these have impacted agrarian life in rural Karnataka.
Scholars from varied disciplines of social science in the recent past have been engaged in revisiting the concepts of rural, urban, peasant, non-peasant, formal, informal labour, intermediaries, money-lenders, classes of labour, new forms of caste bondage, freedom and un-freedom, given the significant changes in rural and urban India.