This book explores the informal (political) patronage relations between the urban poor and service delivery organisations in Mumbai, India. It examines the conditions of people in the slums and traces the extent to which they are subject to social and political exclusion. Delving into the roles of the slum-based mediators and municipal councillors, it brings out the problems in the functioning of democracy at the ground level, as election candidates target vote banks with freebies and priv...

This volume looks at concepts and processes of social exclusion and social inclusion. It traces a number of discourses, all of them routed in a relational power analysis, examining them in the context of the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development 2030 with its commitment to “leave no one behind.” The book combines analysis that is fundamentally critical of the rhetoric of social inclusion in academic and UN discourse with narratives of social exclusion processes and social inclusion contest...

India has one of the fastest growing economies on earth. Over the past three decades, socialism has been replaced by pro-business policies as the way forward. And yet, in this 'new' India, grinding poverty is still a feature of everyday life. Some 450 million people subsist on less than $1.25 per day and nearly half of India's children are malnourished. In his latest book, Atul Kohli, a seasoned scholar of Indian politics and economics, blames this discrepancy on the narrow nature of the r...

Twenty years ago India was still generally thought of as an archetypal developing country, home to the largest number of poor people of any country in the world, and beset by problems of low economic growth, casteism and violent religious conflict. Now India is being feted as an economic power-house which might well become the second largest economy in the world before the middle of this century. Its democratic traditions, moreover, remain broadly intact.How and why has this histor...

India is emerging as a key player in the development cooperation arena, not only because of the increasing volume and reach of its south-south cooperation but more so because of its leadership and advocacy for the development of a distinctly southern development discourse and knowledge generation.This book traces and analyses the evolution of Indian development cooperation. It highlights its significance both to global development and as an effective tool of Indian foreign policy. ...

In the center of Mumbai, next to the city’s newest and most expensive commercial developments, lies one of Asia’s largest slums, where as many as one million squatters live in makeshift housing on one square mile of government land. This is the notorious Dharavi district, best known from the movie Slumdog Millionaire. In recent years, cities from Delhi to Rio de Janeiro have demolished similar slums, at times violently evicting their residents, to make way for development. But Dha...

Rapid industrialisation is promoted by many as the most feasible way of rejuvenating the Indian economy, and as a way of generating employment on a large scale. At the same time, the transfer of land from rural communities and indigenous groups for industrial parks, mining, or Special Economic Zones has emerged as perhaps the most explosive issue in India over the past decade. Industrialising Rural India sheds light on crucial political and social dynamics that unfold today as Ind...

Democratization from Above seeks to explain why some national and state governments in the developing world introduce reforms to make local governance more democratic while others neglect or actively undermine democracy at local levels of government. The study challenges conventional wisdom that local democratization is implemented as a means of granting more autonomy to local actors. Instead, Anjali Thomas Bohlken argues that local democratization offers higher level government elites who...

A number of large-scale transformations have shaped the economy, polity and society of India over the past quarter century. This book provides a detailed account of three that are of particular importance: the advent of liberal economic reform, the ascendance of Hindu cultural nationalism, and the empowerment of historically subordinate classes through popular democratic mobilizations.Filling a gap in existing literature, the book goes beyond looking at the transformations in isola...

Each year, millions of people are internally displaced and resettled in the wake of wars and floods or to make way for large-scale development projects, and this number is increasing. Humanitarian and development specialists continue to struggle with designing and executing effective protection strategies and durable solutions.Relocation Failures explains how internal displacement and efforts to engineer resettlement are conceived and practiced by policy makers and practitioners. T...

This book sheds light on social policies in six South Asian countries introduced between 2003 and 2013, examining the ways in which these policies have come about, and what this reflects about the nature of the state in each of these countries. It offers a detailed analysis of the nature of these policies introduced in recent years in Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and illustrates the similarities and differences in policy approaches amongst the six countries. ...

Written by fifteen leading academics from the Japan Society for International Development (JASID), this book undertakes a review of Japan's economic development over the last 150 years, and seeks to clarify Japanese priorities in domestic and foreign policy for the coming decades.