Emigration is a subject that is little debated and studied in India though in recent months, there have been debates in the Indian media about the merit of sending low-skilled workers from India to Israel. Agarwala’s book focuses on the emigration experience from the perspective of a sending state, i.e.,
India and focuses on how existing class inequalities within India are reproduced through India’s emigration practices. In this primarily sociological study, Agarwala develops a new framework for studying emigration called ‘Migration-Development Regimes’ (MDR) and painstakingly traces the history of emigration in India. She thus reframes the emigration practices of sending states as a regime to help capture the sending state’s ‘ideological, economic, and political interests’ and