This article provides a gendered, anti-caste critique of Sulabh International’s widely celebrated rehabilitation model for Dalit women manual scavengers, situating it within the broader field of environmental politics. While Sulabh has demonstrably improved the material conditions of thousands of Dalit women—ending their engagement with manual scavenging and offering new forms of livelihood and public visibility—it simultaneously reproduces caste and gender hierarchies through ritual, symbolism and the authority of a Brahmin male founder. The article argues that the domain of environmental reform, particularly when mediated by social organizations, has not been sufficiently interrogated for how it becomes a site for recalibrating Brahminical patriarchy and operationalizing caste power, with women as its central subjects. The article thus highlights the need to critically engage with the intersection of caste, gender and environment and to reimagine environmental justice through anti-caste and Dalit feminist lenses.

This article investigates the relationship between financial liberalization and financial development in Pakistan, using human capital as a threshold variable over the period 1972–2023. The research finds that human capital must reach a value of 1.66 for overall financial liberalization to effectively take place. To gain deeper insights, the study decomposes overall financial liberalization into internal and external components. The estimated threshold values of human capital are 1.66 for internal and 1.53 for external financial liberalization. The results show that financial development is hindered when external financial liberalization remains below the human capital threshold, whereas the opposite effect is observed for internal financial liberalization. Once the human capital surpasses the threshold, both internal financial liberalization and external financial liberalization, as well as overall financial liberalization, positively contribute to financial development in Pakistan. These findings confirm that the positive relationship between financial liberalization and financial development is conditional upon reaching a specific threshold level of human capital. However, the relatively small magnitudes associated with each type of financial liberalization suggest that further reforms in financial sector policies are necessary. A reformed financial sector will then be better positioned to play a leading role in achieving sustainable economic growth. To this end, more focused efforts are required to improve the quality of human capital in Pakistan, ensuring its productive contribution to the finance–growth nexus. Additionally, macroeconomic variables also support financial development. Therefore, policymakers must ensure the effective utilization of physical capital stock, government expenditures and the maintenance of moderate inflation levels to foster the development of the financial sector.

This research proposes to probe the mutual association between environmental, social and governance (ESG) and social scores on the operational (inventory turnover ratio and sales) and financial (gross profit margin) performance of Indian firms. Moreover, the competition is used as a moderator to study the association between ESG and social scores on the Indian firm performance. This study measures linear and non-linear associations between the variables. Employing quantile regression for the 25th, 50th and 75th quantiles, it examines the association between a firm’s performance and its social and ESG score. For the study, data from 316 listed non-financial enterprises in India during 12 years (2011–2022) are combined. The study found that ESG and social score significantly affect inventory turnover, gross profit margin ratio and sales differently on different levels. Competition also significantly moderates the association of ESG, social score and a firm’s financial and operational performance in different quantiles. These research findings help managers consider competitive advantage as a factor in enhancing firm performance. According to the study’s findings, it guides managers, practitioners and authorities who are curious about firm performance, competitive advantage and ESG scores find interesting insights into the information. Managers can find the right amount of competitive advantage that enhances firm performance. The results also provide information on potential future growth for corporations to the board of directors and other authorities. We do not observe any paper reporting the non-linear and linear association where the connection of ESG and performance is assessed under the moderation of competition in Indian firms. The research’s conclusions can guide Indian businesses, outlining a workable structure for highlighting the value of ESG disclosure in performance evaluations. Therefore, the current article contributes substantially to the existing body of knowledge on sustainability and finance.

Inclusive growth (IG) aims to create decent work and economic opportunities for all, including marginalized populations, which aligns with the SDG-8 objective of promoting sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth. Many studies measure IG through a single dimension, overlooking its multidimensional economic, social, health, and sustainability aspects. This study contributes by constructing a multidimensional IG index and using the four dimensions and 15 indicators, which cover all the aspects of IG. Moreover, the study investigates the determinants of IG with a particular focus on foreign remittances and institutional quality in Pakistan from 1996 to 2021. The bootstrap auto regressive distributive lag (BARDL), fully modified ordinary least-squares and dynamic ordinary least-squares techniques are employed for estimating the results. The long-run estimates reveal that remittances, institutional quality, trade openness and financial development showed positive effects on IG. While inflation, population growth and unemployment exert a negative impact on IG. Moreover, BARDL short-run estimates reveal that remittances, institutional quality and financial development have a positive effect on IG. In contrast, population growth and trade openness have a negative impact on IG. The policy advice is that the government develop strategies to optimize the inflow of international remittances and enhance the institutional quality to promote the IG in Pakistan.

Population policies in India have been rebranded as family planning with an emphasis on reproductive and child health. The current policy aims to advance autonomy and choice to women and couples to make decisions about their family constitution. However, there exists a disjuncture between the policy discourse and on-the-ground lived reality. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic research between 2011–2012 and 2023–2024 with Muslim women and their families in a low-income mixed neighbourhood in Delhi, I analyse the interplay of religious, class and gender discriminations that influence women’s everyday reproductive experiences and navigation of state policy. Although policymakers and healthcare service providers assume that low-income Muslim women are irresponsible, resist contraception and lack agency to plan their families, I argue that they employ ‘wise planning’ ( samajhdari ki yojana ) to seek suitable forms of contraception and child healthcare services in the context of precarious work responsibilities, gendered familial arrangements and state-imposed programmes. The matrix of ‘wise planning’ intimately captures Muslim women’s experiences and navigations of institutional and infrastructural disparities in resource-poor settings.

This article investigates exchange rate exposure (at the firm level and overall) of 211 non-financial firms to four major currencies across two overlapping sample periods employing both static (OLS) and dynamic (ARDL, CS-ARDL) estimation techniques. A novel model specification (model 2) replaces market return with cross-sectional average return in model 1, the conventional specification, to find relatively more efficient estimates, mitigating cross-sectional dependence (CSD) in most cases. OLS finds a highest of 14.7% firms to Rupee, whereas ARDL finds a highest of 13.2.% firms to Rupee and Yuan contemporaneously exposed in the full-sample and pre-covid period, respectively. ARDL detects lagged exposure in all cases with a smaller number of firms exposed in subsequent lags. Positive exposure to Dollar (USD) in most cases, and a larger number of firms exposed to Yuan and Rupee in the full-sample period (which includes the COVID-19 and Russia–Ukraine war) are detected. Overall, contemporaneous exposure detected by pooled OLS finds the least, followed by CS-ARDL long-run estimates, with short-run CS-ARDL detecting the highest number of cases (in both periods, model 2 detects no exposure in the full-sample period like OLS estimates). While lagged exposure is detected under model 1 to all currencies, model 2 detects no lagged exposure in any case.

This article generates a framework for understanding the impact of socio-economic stratification within a social movement on the movement’s trajectory. Based on existing literature (particularly Varigonda, 2020), it hypothesizes that socio-economic stratification impacts a movement’s trajectory by influencing the politicization of state policy, the strength of a movement’s action repertoires and the openness of state input structures. This is then applied to a historical–comparative study of the anti-nuclear movement in Kudankulam, which was stratified into caste Hindu farmers and Christian fisherfolk. Through a comparison of three distinctive iterations of the movement—in the late 1980s, the mid-2000s and 2011–2012—the article generates a novel framework for analysing the impact of intra-movement stratification on its trajectory, proposing that politicization of state policy leads to inclusive mobilization when stratified communities perceive a significant adverse impact from the policy, and limited mobilization when they do not; that a movement’s action repertoires are strengthened when stratified communities perceive significant roles within the movement, and are weakened when they do not; and that state input structures are further opened for privileged communities while being closed for marginalized communities within a stratified movement.