In 2021, the bureaucracy or more specifically the Indian Administrative Service, made its way into the headlines in unexpected and unsavory ways. In February, while defending the governments’ disinvestment policy in Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a sharp attack against the bureaucracy. ‘Babu’s will do everything? What is this great power we have created?’ he asked, ‘What are we going to achieve by handing over the reins of the nation to babus?’
Prime Minister Modi is not alone in expressing deep-seated frustration with the bureaucracy and in particular the elite IAS. Nearly all his predecessors from Nehru to Manmohan Singh (the irony notwithstanding) routinely pointed fingers at the babu for all that was wrong with India’s ‘governance’ – red tape, inefficiency, corruption. ‘The government at every level… is not adequately equipped… to meet the aspirations of people’, said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his first address to the nation as Prime Minister back in 2004. But what differentiates February’s attack from frustrations of the past is the fact that it was made in Parliament in full public view and in defence of the private sector.
In September 2020, three controversial farm acts passed by the Parliament gave way to one of the largest protest movements in recent history. But the protests were about much more than India’s agricultural policy – and they had significant resonance beyond the farmers of Haryana and Punjab that were most affected by the controversial farm bills.1 Rather, the larger critique made by the farmer protests coalesced around a criticism of bowing to ‘corporate interests’ supported by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In my view, the farmer protests had great impact and resonance, eventually causing the government to rescind the laws, due to popular anxieties about the changing face of business-politics relations in India.
In this piece, I chronicle the extraordinary level of economic centralization and corporate consolidation taking place in India today. I attempt to theorize how this consolidation is both a result of the prevailing political environment in India, and how it perpetuates greater political and economic centralization. I hope this short piece encourages others to focus research and commentary on the unprecedented levels of economic centralization we are seeing in India today and its impacts on society.
Prime Minister’s Awas Yojna (PMAY) – Urban (U) – a Centrally sponsored Mission mode program launched in the year 2015 – embarked on the ambitious journey of provisioning Housing for All by 2022. Seven years into the implementation, it emerges that almost 70 percent uptake of PMAY is for the Beneficiary-Led Construction (BLC). This was not the case in the initial days. Not having the ‘Right’ papers restricted uptake of the BLC implementation. Most states in the beginning insisted on Records of Rights (RoR) as the adequate evidence of ownership. The poor especially in small and medium towns, most often will not have RoRs. The urban poor mostly use their plots for selfuse; so not enough incentive for them to get the RoRs which is administratively complex, expensive and time intensive. Many states addressed these barriers through process innovations and facilitated the urban poor to gain access to subsidy under BLC. This paper highlights the specific processes involved in Odisha for obtaining the ‘Right’ papers and innovations adopted by the State for regularising the land titles of the urban poor. These innovations facilitated the urban poor in the state of Odisha to access subsidy under BLC.
Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY-Urban) was launched in 2015 to address the housing requirements of the urban poor, having four verticals to channel its subsidies. Among them, Beneficiary- Led Individual House Construction (BLC) has emerged as the most successful, with a large proportion of housing being sanctioned under the same. To understand the process of BLC implementation and the innovative interventions by states, primary surveys were conducted across Odisha, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, accounting for 1 in every 10th BLC sanctions in the country. This paper aims to document the various aspects of BLC house construction associated with land, finance, and access to basic services. It further draws out learnings necessary for PMAY (U) that underscores the importance of BLC/self-built housing schemes to answer the critical demand-supply gap that is often widened by a dysfunctional real estate market, especially for the EWS. Finally, it identifies three primary enablers – access to land, holistic city planning, and access to institutional finances – to be leveraged for achieving the national ‘Housing for All’ agenda in the medium to long term.
MUCH has already been written about women’s representation in Indian national politics.1 In this article, we add to existing contributions by examining recent data from India’s 2019 general elections and use that data to identify changes and continuities in various aspects of women’s participation in politics as national electoral candidates.
THE last year saw the release of six mainstream Bollywood films and web series, portraying female politicians either as protagonists or in key roles, these include Madam Chief Minister, Thalaivi, Bellbottom, Maharani, Tandav and Family Man. All of them were widely popular for having either a large viewership or critical acclaim or just for the controversies that surrounded their release.
AS of late 2021, India counted the largest absolute number of women elected to political office of all countries in the world. India also has one of the world’s highest proportions of political offices currently held by women. The histories of Indian women as political leaders complement these rather remarkable statistics. India was led by a female prime minister far earlier than nearly all western democracies; a woman has led its ruling party; and many others – from Jayalalithaa to Mayawati to Mamata Banerjee – have led states larger than countries, sometimes for decades. This female leadership has turned traditional patterns of political dominance on their heads.
THE Himalaya was, for centuries, an impenetrable barrier between India and China. It circumscribed trade between growing civilizations, and forestalled potential conflict. Epistemic communities and technological trajectories were isolated by rock and ice. It is a geographic barrier that has shaped human history.
Meeting the sanitation needs of a growing and urbanizing population in India led the incumbent national government to launch a large-scale sanitation programme, the Swachh Bharat Mission in 2014. Having reduced the deficit in basic rural sanitation in its first phase, the programme is targeting to achieve universal safely managed sanitation in its second phase launched in February 2020. Since the trajectory to achieving safely managed sanitation is inherently path-dependent, the present article utilizes novel survey data from rural India to understand the nature of sanitation systems in transitioning spaces and identify the investments they require to provide safely managed sanitation. It finds that the de facto preference in sanitation systems that households manifest is in direct contrast to the governmental choice of the low-cost twin pit system. The choice of the on-site sanitation system is informed by the household’s economic status and how ‘characteristically’ urban the settlements they reside in are. The article further discusses the implications of these findings for the short-term responsiveness and long-term effectiveness of the massive sanitation investments (USD 19 billion) planned for the next five years in India.
As with many other aspects of city life, urban mobility has been one of the biggest victims of the COVID-19 pandemic. While on the one hand, the governments across the world have put many restrictions on the operation of vehicles in urban areas, and on the other, the pandemic has dramatically altered the public perceptions on the use of public transport (Finbom et al 2021; Gkiotsalitis and Cats 2021). Researchers in China have found a direct correlation between the public transport connections from Wuhan (the city where the first COVID-19 cases were detected) to other cities and the number of people infected with the virus (Zhang et al 2020). These findings led many governments to seal their borders, close ports and harbours, and stop public transport services.
