Green Revolution And After: The 'North Arcot Papers' And Long Term Studies Of The Political Economy Of Rural Development in South India

This working paper has two objectives. The first is to summarise the results of rounds of research from 1973 onwards on the green revolution in South India. It provides background both to the research reported in Harriss-White, Janakarajan et al, 2004, 'Rural India facing the 21st century' (London, Anthem) and to several research projects currently being conducted by masters and doctoral students in QEH. The second objective is to reflect on the achievements and problems of those long term villages studies which are not based on panel data - at a time when village studies have been neglected and are being revived once more.

Development, Policy and Agriculture in India in the 1990s

Policy tends to be depoliticised in development discourse. In this paper Bernard Schaffer's framework for the political analysis of policy is recalled and developed. Repoliticising policy involves the analysis of four overlapping political fields: those of agenda, procedure, resources and access. The framework is applied to the politics of the agricultural policy agenda over the recent past in India, and with special reference to Tamil Nadu state.

A Note On Destitution

In this paper the economic, social and political dimensions of destitution are analysed. Economic destitution is seen as a contradiction in terms since destitute people survive without assets and income. Social destitution is a process of expulsion and of the denial of dependent status. The state plays an active political role in creating and perpetuating destitution. Next, destitution is mapped onto other paradigms of poverty. Finally responses outside and inside political economy are outlined. Case material is drawn from India.

Commercialisation, Commodification And Gender Relations In Post Harvest Systems For Rice In South Asia

When the output of a product that has been the basis of subsistence and social reproduction - as rice has been in Asia - expands, the marketed surplus rises disproportionately to the growth rate of production. Post harvest activities that were part and parcel of the reproductive activity of household labour (in the hands and under the feet of women - even if under the control of men) then also become commercialised. Firms expand in number and labour markets sprout up as firms become differentiated in size, scale and activity. Food security comes to depend not only on the market but also on the social and political structures in which markets are embedded. One of these social structures is gender. Two aspects of this gendered process are explored in this essay. The first is 'productive deprivation' which was argued by Ester Boserup to be the most notable impact of development on women. Using field evidence comparatively from four regions of South Asia from the 1970s to the present, the impact of the waves of technological change accompanying concentration and differentiation in rice markets is shown to be strongly net labour displacing and strongly biased against female labour. Nevertheless productive deprivation is class specific and masculinisation still co-exists with a high general level of female economic participation. To start to explain why productive deprivation is class specific the essay offers a development of Ursula Huws' theory of commodification and its impact on women in advanced capitalist conditions - elaborating it for conditions of mass poverty. Poverty is shown to limit the relevance of this gendered theory. Poverty is also an important reason for the persistence of petty commodity production and trade and petty service provision. Under petty production women are either self employed or unwaged family workers for men who are themselves not fully independent but frequently dependent on money advances from commercial capital. Evidence from West Bengal in the 1990s - where the growth of rice production has eased up - shows by contrast that the process of commodification has not eased up at all. Products, by-products, intermediate and investment goods, waste, public goods, state regulative resources and labour are all relentlessly commodified. The process creates livelihoods mainly for young, low caste men. Low caste women dominate itinerant retailing, directly dependent on money advances from male wholesalers. Women are being displaced from the rice mill labour forces in which economies of scale are pitched against unwaged work in petty production. The subordinated status and double work burden of women in petty production is well known, as is their economic dependence and social insecurity. (rice - masculinisation - commodification - comparative regional analysis - comparative institutional analysis).

India's Socially Regulated Economy

By far the larger part of the contemporary Indian economy - judged by measures as disparate as GDP and livelihoods - is not directly regulated by the state. It is regulated through social institutions. Social institutions express forms of power not confined to the economy. Macro-economic policy is implemented through their filters. In this paper some propositions derived from a large primary literature concerning the roles of gender, religious plurality, caste, space, class and the state are introduced. Liberalisation is argued to increase the tension between forces dissolving social forms of regulation and those intensifying them.

Poverty and Capitalism

While it may be possible to mitigate poverty through social transfers, it is not possible to eradicate the processes that create poverty under capitalism. Eight such processes are discussed: i) the creation of the pre-conditions; ii) petty commodity production and trade; iii) technological change and unemployment; iv) (petty) commodification; v) harmful commodities and waste; vi) pauperising crises ; vii) climate-change-related pauperisation; and viii) the un-required and/or incapacitated and/or dependent human body under capitalism. Ways to regulate these processes and to protect against their impacts are discussed. Poverty. Capitalism. Institutions. Political economy. Development.

Corporative Capitalism: Civil Society and the Politics of Accumulation in Small Town India

Using the analytical framework of social structures of accumulation, the economic politics of local urban civil-social organisations and their impact on capital, class and the business economy is examined. Although such organisations are structured through many dimensions, notably occupation, commodity, party politics, religion, gender and locality, the most prominent single category comprises caste - and closely-related, finely-defined occupational- associations. In the town's societal corporatist form of accumulation, the political, cultural and ideological hegemony of a single social group - the capitalist class - imposes itself, supported by a strong ideology based on transformations to the institution of caste. Due to the reinforcement of caste, patriarchy and the rhetoric of town unity, economic interests and ideological factors overlap in exactly the manner Gramsci thought to be the essence of civil society. Furthermore, through the caste system and through patriarchy, ideology comes to form a significant component in the local social structures of accumulation.

Anti-poverty Policy: Screening for Eligibility Using Village-level Evidence

In the context of targeting of state transfers based on income poverty lines, this study is concerned with the identification of households that may have been wrongly included in the target group. To this end, we investigate the relationship between self-declared private income and some 478 household variables obtained in a village level survey. We use class probability tree analysis which is a non-parametric multivariate method. Relationships are expressed as easily interpretable rules that give combinations of the important features that characterise the 'poor' households (income declared below the income poverty line) and the 'non-poor' (income declared above the income poverty line), rather than as mathematical equations as in previous regression based analyses. Approximately 20% of the households that declared income so as to be classified 'poor' were found to have feature combinations which were similar to those characterising 'non-poor' households. These cases would thus be worthy of further investigation for distortion of income, before being considered eligible for any transfers.

Innovation in India's Informal Economy

This paper examines the ubiquitous formal-informal duality of Indian economy through a case study of Arni, a Moffusil town of Northern Tamil Nadu. Arni is populated by about one lakh people; the majority of them are low castes. Informal sector dominates the economy of the town, but formal-informal linkages are strong and visible everywhere. The socio-economic life of the town is inextricably interwoven with the formal-informal duality which apparently lies at ease, unnoticed by the inhabitants and actors of the formal and the informal economy. Against the conventional wisdom, the informal economy of Arni is a crucible of innovations which are of various types. They are adoptive and adaptive, incremental and ruptural, for profit making and other uses, problem solving and solution oriented, filling the gap, and so on. Sometimes, they are meant for the promotion of collective interests and sometimes only for an individual like running the business of the family. These innovations are, however, not confined only to the domain of the informal economy, but are also part of the formal economy. In such an economy, the formal-informal duality is transposed to the level of institutions that results in 'hybridity" of institutions. The 'hybridity of institutions' is although functional, yet not without contradictions. Finally, the study emphasizes that the informal economy of India is not stagnant or resistant to changes. It is driving India's high growth rate. Innovations of the informal economy are an important driver of this high growth rate