The political prioritisation of welfare in India:comparing the Public Distribution System in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand

The idea of state responsibility for ensuring food security has gained ground, with strong popular mobilisations for the Right to Food around the world; but important variations prevail, both in the articulation of demands around food security interventions and in political responses to these. This paper takes a close look at India’s Public Distribution System, a programme with a long history and clear national-level, legislative backing, but considerable differences in prioritisation at the subnational level. Through an empirically rich and innovative comparison of Chhattisgarh with Jharkhand – both created at the same time, in 2000 – it asks why the opportunities afforded by statehood allowed Chhattisgarh to politically prioritise the PDS, but not Jharkhand. The paper finds that the explanation lies in the interrelated dimensions of political competition, the nature of pressures exerted by electorally significant societal groups, and political enablement of bureaucratic capacity. Finally, the analytical framework at the heart of the paper contributes to the emerging literature on the political conditions that allow the deployment of state capacity for the promotion of welfar

21 days and counting : COVID-19 lockdown, migrant workers, and the inadequacy of welfare measures in India

On the 25th of March the Prime Minister (PM), Mr. Narendra Modi, announced a nationwide lockdown to stem the spread of the novel Coronavirus, COVID-19.. The decision, while imminent, was unplanned and unilaterally made without any consultation with the state governments. This has consequently caught millions of migrant workers and the bureaucracy off-guard, leaving them no time to plan for such an emergency. While millions of migrants successfully reached their home states, only to be quarantined in camps, many remain stranded far from home, with no money or food. We are therefore confronting a lethal combination of crises: health, hunger, sanitation, and trauma, both physical and psychological

The political prioritization of welfare in India: comparing the Public Distribution System in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand

The idea of state responsibility for ensuring food security has gained ground, with strong popular mobilizations for the Right to Food around the world; but important variations prevail, both in the articulation of demands around food security interventions and in political responses to these. This paper takes a close look at India’s Public Distribution System (PDS), a program with a long history and clear national-level, legislative backing, but considerable differences in prioritization at the subnational level. We focus on the unique paired comparison of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, both amongst the poorest regions in India and the world, which share the same moment of state creation in 2000 and ask why the opportunities afforded by statehood allowed Chhattisgarh to politically prioritize the PDS, but not Jharkhand. The paper finds that the explanation lies in the interrelated dimensions of political-electoral competition, the nature of pressures exerted by influential societal groups, and the developmental orientation of the political leadership and its enablement of bureaucratic capacity. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on the political conditions that allow the deployment of state capacity for the promotion of welfare in emerging welfare states. In doing so, the paper also seeks to advance the repertoire of conceptual tools available for understanding the expansion of social policy in varied institutional contexts across the Global South

Grassroots Reform in the Global South (2017)

In 2016, USAID's Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance launched its Learning Agenda—a set of research questions designed to address the issues that confront staff in USAID field offices working on the intersection of development and democracy, human rights, and governance. This literature review—produced by a team of sociologists and political scientists—synthesizes scholarship from diverse research traditions on the following Learning Agenda question:How and when does grassroots reform scale up? When citizen participation has led to local reforms in a particular sector (e.g., health), what processes lead to these reforms' influencing the regional or national levels of that sector (e.g., citizen groups monitoring medicine supplies in local clinics leads eventually to pharmaceutical procurement reform in the Ministry of Health)?The report itself is divided into four principal sections:Section 1 outlines the context for the report by discussing the importance of grassroots reform, defining key terms, and describing its methodology.Section 2 documents the experiences of different regions with an eye toward intra-regional comparisons.Section 3 distills two types of lessons from the regional experiences: relatively abstract lessons of broad relevance and relatively precise lessons of less general relevance.Section 4 discusses the translation of the authors' findings into actionable lessons and concludes by discussing the limits to their knowledge base, pending research questions, and methodological impediments to their resolution

Manufactured maladies : lives and livelihoods of migrant workers during COVID‑19 lockdown in India

The 68 days of lockdown in India, as a measure to contain the spread of the COVID19 pandemic, resulted in an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, unlike any other in the world. In the frst half of the lockdown, migrant workers were stranded with no food and money with severe restrictions on movement when a mass exodus of workers back to their hometowns and villages began. In the second half, the workers’ woes were compounded with a series of chaotic travel orders and gross mismanagement of the repatriation process. In this article, we draw on the work of Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN) with more analysis and perspective. SWAN was a spontaneous relief efort that emerged soon after the lockdown was announced in March 2020. In addition to providing relief, SWAN concurrently documented the experiences of over 36,000 workers through the lockdown. We highlight the inadequacy of the government and judicial response to the migrant worker crisis. We present quantitative data elaborating the profle of workers that reached out to SWAN, the extent of hunger, loss of livelihoods and income. We also present qualitative insights based on interactions with workers and discuss multiple, non-exhaustive, dimensions of vulnerability to which migrant workers were exposed

The role of civil society organizations (CSOs) in the COVID-19 response across the Global South: A multinational, qualitative study.

Despite receiving less attention than high-income countries, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) experienced more than 85% of global excess deaths during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the unprecedented speed and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic, which placed large demands on government capacity, many LMICs relied on civil society organizations (CSOs) to assist in implementing COVID-19 response programs. Yet few studies have examined the critical role CSOs played in mitigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in low resource settings. This study explored the CSO response to COVID-19 in five of the most heavily impacted LMICs in the Global South. Interviews were conducted from May to August 2021 with a purposive sample of CSO key informants within each of the five countries. A total of 52 CSOs were selected from which 53 key informants were interviewed either via Zoom or by phone. Interviews were coded and analyzed using NVivo or MAXQDA2020. Out of the 52 CSOs selected, 24 were national organizations, 8 were regional, and 20 were local. CSOs fell into six categories: community-based organizations, non-governmental organizations, unions/professional organizations, campaigns/social movements, research organizations/think tanks, and networks/coalitions. CSOs across all five countries adapted their missions, stretched their resources, and performed a wide range of activities that fit into five programmatic areas: food security and livelihood support, public health and medical care, cash transfer programs, risk communication and community education, and needs assessment. This qualitative analysis demonstrates the critical role CSOs played in supplementing government emergency aid response by delivering necessary resources and supporting highly vulnerable populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the primary challenges they faced in doing so. Given the generally weak state of public capacity in the LMICs studied, this role was vital to responding to the pandemic