Post-liberalization India Research Articles

The Self-reliant India and Development Trajectory Process: Emerging Regional Strategies in Sustainability Paradigm

Development means to bring a kind of change and improvement in lives of humans and societies inhabiting settlements, areas and regions. The process has never been uniform in practice as humans live in varied places and manifest complex socio-cultural geographies. To improve life conditions is to provide for basic amenities and necessities. This requires coherence and integrated management of environmental conditions which are subject to unprecedented changes and effects. However, to a majority of people improvement in living status still persists as the bigger challenge in countries of the Global South. In India, the new economic policy-led economic reforms and subsequent increase in economic activities has had a greater pressure on the natural environment. In this backdrop, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a blended policy and strategy since it has bundle of targets to be achieved in order to address basic necessities of human population and maintaining society-nature relations. The performance of regions in the country in delivering SDGs has been a geographically variable phenomenon. The regional inequalities including social, economic, infrastructural, and environmental aspects are the emerging geographies of the post-liberalized India which need to be tackled under newer development policy. To check further exaggeration of environment and society-nature relations, and upholding position of a vibrant economy, the Self-reliant (Aatmanirbhar Bharat) approach of India is to strengthen planning, governance and management of sustainable development process more in an integrated regional development framework and utilization of indigenous resources. Study is based on secondary sources of data and information, this provides a constructive perspective in understanding regional performance of sustainable development and the role that self-reliant strategy is to play strengthening process of development in the country.

Spectacle of democracy: the quasi-executive functions of television news in India

ABSTRACT This article calls for enhancing the horizon of Political Communication Studies, drawing attention to certain relation between the media, the state and the public in a globalised world. Focusing on private mainstream news television in post-liberalisation India, it tries to show how Media, in its singularised popular sense of sensationalising news, generating live-stream of public opinion, conducting parallel investigation of crimes, judging the sub judice and posing as sovereign by perennially endorsing the logic of self-regulation, tries to appropriate the functions, image and rhetoric of the state institutions (the executive, the judiciary and the legislature). The article primarily explores the quasi-executive functions to understand the role of a seemingly autonomous public in Indian democracy. The increasing tussle that we are witnessing between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, the article argues, is to a large extent due to Media’s claim to represent the public more effectively than any state institution, pushing “pillars of democracy” to fight with each other for their share of credit in serving the public.

Urban comics and social justice: restructuring neoliberal spaces of Delhi in Sarnath Banerjee’s all quiet in Vikaspuri

ABSTRACT The present paper seeks to focus on one of the prominent aspects of South Asian comics; the nature of urbanity, through a study of Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri, a narrative primarily set in Delhi. Banerjee’s Delhi is the space of the capitalists, urban planners, and corrupt policies; in short a ‘social product’, as Henri Lefebvre had formulated. The paper will examine how Delhi, in Banerjee’s comics, is symptomatic of various states of discriminatory infrastructural development, failure and violence endemic to the system, as in many other emerging South Asian cities. It will further investigate the dynamics of uneven development and urban inequality of Delhi to argue the emergence of new socio-spatial and economic trajectories in post-liberalisation India. The paper seeks to argue that through the multiple references to pulp fictions, mythic and hybrid spaces, Banerjee maps the nuanced changes in urban lifestyle and the more liberal shift towards exclusionary spatial practices such as ‘short-termism’, but also present alternative histories and regional resistance of the lived space that go against the planned space of the city. Finally, the paper will borrow insights from theorists such as Sanjay Srivastava, Ananya Roy, David Harvey, and others to argue how social and spatial justice can be achieved through urban comics that, according to Dominic Davies, helps to restructure ‘more socially and spatially just cities’.

Determinants of the Trade Balance in India. Evidence from a Post-Liberalisation Period

Abstract The present study investigates trade balance determinants in post-liberalization India from 1991 to 2020. The main aim of this study is to test the validity of the J-curve and Marshal-Lerner condition and examine the impact of other related macroeconomic variables, including foreign income, exchange rate, domestic prices, and domestic demand on the country’s trade balance. To achieve this objective, bounds tests and error correction model within asymmetric and symmetrical framework was used for estimation. In addition, variance decomposition analysis was applied to examine the dynamic interaction of selected variables. The results indicate the absence of the ‘J-curve’ effect and ‘Marshall-Lerner’ condition in India. Further, the results indicate that domestic prices, domestic demand, and money supply have negative signs, whereas exchange rate and world demand have positive signs in the long and short-run. The results from the variance decomposition indicate that as compared to other variables, the exchange rate highly contributes to forecasting error variance of trade balance in the case of India

Caste as Process in Post-Liberalisation India

The task of recent scholarship on India’s post-liberalisation period has been, in part, a re-casteing: a deliberate investigation of the ways in which historically embedded hierarchical divisions are continually reworked and thereby reinvigorated. Amid contemporary debates over the forms, sites and effects of caste and caste discrimination, this article identifies a shift in critical scholarship towards understandings of caste as process. Processual readings of caste within market- and merit-based institutions productively reframe caste in India from a ‘relic’ undergoing erosion to an accretion of new layers and logics upon older principles of innate human value.

Where Does Ascribed Privilege Get You in? Structural and Net Effects of Caste and Religious Belonging in India

Socio-economically advantaged upper castes tend to claim that Indian society is ‘post-caste’, suggesting that individuals from historically marginalized castes and religious groups do not face specific social barriers when attempting to move into white-collar positions. Alleged intergenerational mobility and the emergence of a ‘new middle class’ related to the growth of the private sector is widely used to counter affirmative action initiatives in higher education and public-sector recruitment. In this article, I test these claims by examining Brahmin, lower caste Dalit and Muslim patterns of intergenerational class and educational mobility of father–child pairs. I point to the strong role of caste and religion in shaping one’s destination, particularly when accessing top occupational positions in the private sector. These results question the meritocratic and casteless claims of the Indian ‘new middle class’ in post-liberalization India, and they call for more encompassing policies reducing origin-based inequality.

When Does Infrastructure “Qualify for [Artistic] Attention”? The “ABCs” of Contemporary Art in Post-Liberalization India

The period between “liberalization,” or the 1991 opening of India's economy to foreign direct investment, and the 2008 onset of the Great Recession was one of unprecedented change in the forms of Indian art and the infrastructures that supported its understanding, presentation, and circulation. This period of efflorescence—of multiplying growth in and transformation of a set of interlocking artistic and social forms—poses methodological challenges similar to those identified by George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers in their 1995 volume, The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. Marcus and Myers’ call to focus on appropriation, boundary-making, and circulation, though meant to submit the Western art world to critique, coincides quite clearly with three particularly salient changes seen in Indian contemporary art in the period: the turn to unconventional material as artistic media (appropriation); the deliberate integration of artistic work with the materialities of everyday life (boundary); and the development of entirely new curatorial infrastructures and frameworks (circulation). The present essay examines these changes through Mumbai-based artist Navjot Altaf's post-1996, ongoing collaborative work with adivasi (indigenous) artists in the Central Indian region of Bastar. Eventually registered as the NGO Dialogue Interactive Artists Association (DIAA), the collective's activities have ranged from parallel exhibitions of “art” and “craft” to site-specific, cross-disciplinary engagements with play structures (Pilla Gudi) and water taps (Nalpar) built upon collective practices meant to bridge the considerable social distance between urban upper-class and adivasi artists. DIAA's work with water, like other artistic engagements with infrastructure, highlights the social, aesthetic, material, and political aspects of the built networks that sustain everyday life. Their critique leveraged Marcus and Myers’ ABCs, incorporating critical acts of appropriation, the active violation of social and geographical boundaries, and, above all, demonstration of a concern with circulation.

Incorporating craft: An experiment in community ownership in postliberalization India

This article traces the efforts of India's largest private retailer of craft—Fabindia—to realize its vision of “inclusive capitalism” by creating a network of “community‐owned companies” in which artisan‐suppliers own shares. The contradictions and tensions inherent to this corporate project offer a critical vantage from which to examine processes of economic and political change both in India and globally. This ethnography reveals how the proposal to replace the traditional middleperson with a corporate body introduced new complications and conflicting interests throughout the supply chain. The competing efforts to determine the terms and nature of the relationships between supplier‐shareholders, the community‐owned companies, and Fabindia illuminate the on‐the‐ground negotiation of corporate social responsibility.

Current and Capital Account Dynamics in India: An Empirical Analysis of the Post-Reform Period

This article analyses the dynamics between current account (CA) and capital account in post-liberalisation India. Contemporaneous occurrence of CA deficit along with capital account surplus suggests the possible causal relationship between the two accounts. The theoretical debate around capital account liberalisation (KAL) is developed with the intention to lend support to empirical results for policy formulation. The analysis of arguments for and against KAL liberates us in interpreting the empirical results. Within the framework of KAL, this article proceeds to estimate the relationship between current and capital account. A set of econometric tests are performed on an Indian quarterly data over the period from 1996 to 2018. Econometric analysis reveals that capital account affects CA negatively. Short-run capital and debt flow also affect CA negatively, while foreign direct investment (FDI) affects it positively. We find debt flow to be an important factor, contributing to CA imbalance. Such dynamics is critical for any decision about KAL. From the analysis, it is observed that India needs to encourage FDI, while maintaining strict control over short-term capital, which is highly disruptive, and proceed cautiously towards full KAL. JEL Codes: C32, F21, F32

National Romances: Singleton Desire and the Discovery of India in Chick Lit Narratives

Both the novel’s contribution to the imagining of nations and the role romance plays in this project have been well established. The emergence of chick lit, which tracks the fortunes of a single, young, urban protagonist in post-liberalisation India, offers a lens through which to view the intersection of the neo-liberal economy, nationalism and gender. This study examines two chick lit novels by popular author Anuja Chauhan, showing how they layer romantic union with a fantasy of India that embraces diversity, underpinned by a woman who is able to resolve various dichotomies.

Spatial plans in post-liberalization India: Who’s making the plans for fast-growing Indian urban regions?

ABSTRACT This article asks who is making the plans for India’s fast-growing urban regions? It begins with the adopted conceptual framework illustrating how the perception of plans within the planning discipline has begun to change with an increasing recognition that a more diverse mix of efforts pursued by different planning players, rather than a singular state-sponsored master plan, shapes contemporary cities and urban regions. Employing a careful analysis of spatial plans and interviews with planners and officials, the article next explains the 4 main kinds of planning efforts I found in India’s National Capital Region (NCR): a growing number of state-led plans at different spatial scales; sectoral plans made by public sector agencies like the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI); project-specific plans, such as those sponsored by private developers and emerging entrepreneurs; and tacit and spontaneous plans, including those pursued by local actors, that often leverage unforeseen opportunities, contesting and transforming the preceding plans. The article concludes by calling upon scholars to pay attention to the interplay between these different kinds of plans that are beginning to shape urban India in an unprecedented manner.

Space, screen and the Indian multiplex film

ABSTRACT This article summarises my doctoral thesis on the multiplex movie theatre in post-liberalisation India, whose rise has fostered radical changes in Indian popular cinema. The thesis explores the intersection and interaction of this encounter, where the psychology of architecture influences the cinematic landscape, binding architectural topography to spectatorial life. Cinema is spatially moored to the cinema hall, and even though present-day digital technology makes its relocation to spaces other than the cinema hall possible, the primary intent of cinema production is the cinema hall, its exhibition implicated in a publicness that informs its experience. In exploring how the particular spatial dynamics and imaginative matrix of the multiplex space informs its cinematic narratives, the thesis attempts to examine, through a selection of ‘multiplex films’, the configuration of a new imagination, birthed by the particular social, economic and cultural vectors of the multiplex experience.

Masculine anxiety and ‘new Indian woman’ in the films of Anurag Kashyap

ABSTRACT This essay examines the portrayal of masculine anxiety and the representation of ‘new Indian women’ in Anurag Kashyap’s films Dev D (2009), Ugly (2013) and Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016). Kashyap in his films, particularly in the films mentioned here, focuses on transforming social relations in post-liberalization urban India. His films often portray the anxiety of contemporary Indian men over the issue of female emancipation and their aggression towards those women who defy the patriarchal code of conduct by attempting to assert their own agency. By situating the neurotic, hyper-masculine heroes at the centre of the narratives, they point at the skewed gender relation which despite the pervasive rhetoric of women’s empowerment echoed throughout neoliberal India is increasingly becoming more and more fractured. Kashyap’s films thus act as representatives of a new social order currently in progress in India and compel us to understand the complex process through which the notion of masculinity is being continually configured. The essay traces the connection between the masculine anxiety and the neoliberal social world by exploring the psychic and social lives of the fictional male characters created in Kashyap’s films.

Assembling Amaravati: speculative accumulation in a new Indian city

The paper explores processes of speculative accumulation through land in the making of a new city in Andhra Pradesh, southern India. Rather than analysing the Amaravati plan as an example of neoliberal urbanization or ‘accumulation by dispossession’, it examines how the project is unfolding on the ground by situating it within the region’s ‘vernacular capitalism’ centred on land and finance capital. The paper maps the processes of speculative accumulation through which value is extracted from land by diverse actors, and describes the practices of calculation, investment and negotiation employed by local landowners to manage their uncertain futures and to insert themselves as ‘stakeholders’ in the development of the new city. The Amaravati case reflects the deepening entanglement of transnational and provincial circuits of capital in post-liberalization India.

From ‘Angry Young Man’ to ‘Benevolent Patriarch’: Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood stardom and the remaking of post-liberalization India

ABSTRACTFor popular Hindi cinema’s aficionados, the cinematic idiom’s male protagonist, the Hindi film hero, is perceived as emblematic of the nation’s travails and aspirations. Subsequently, this magnifies the role of the Bollywood male star who with his hyper-virile masculinity, is often employed to the task of articulating questions of national and cultural identity. As the seventies’ iconic ‘Angry Young Man,’ Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan echoed the frustration of a nation battling political ineptitude, corruption and the demise of Nehruvian socialism. However, with the recent reinvention of his star persona, from the erstwhile ‘Angry Young Man’ to what I term as the ‘Benevolent Patriarch,’ Bachchan signifies millennial India’s avowed espousal of neo-liberalism. Employing a detailed analysis of Amitabh Bachchan’s star text, not only as a cinematic icon, but also, his recent avatar as a television host, consummate brand endorser and social media personality, I examine how the shift in his star discourse underlines issues of gender, class and national identity, particularly in the context of the shift from socialist ideals to consumerist aspirations. In doing so, I also contextualize the changing dynamics of contemporary Indian mediascape, with increasing synergy between film, television and digital media, thus engendering in the process, the transformation of the Bollywood star from a movie idol to a transmedia celebrity.

Insurance Consumption and Economic Growth in the Post-Liberalized India: An Empirical Analysis

The present study is aimed at exploring the relationship between insurance consumption and economic growth in India during 1990–2016. Annual insurance penetration, insurance density, and per capita GDP have been used to study the relationship between insurance consumption and economic growth by employing the Johansen cointegration technique. A vector error correction model is applied to study the short-term and long-term relationship between the variables. A one-way causality originating from insurance penetration to economic growth is revealed in the long run. Similarly, insurance density also causes long-term economic growth. Insurance penetration leads to short-term economic growth in India. However, economic growth does not cause insurance penetration or density in the short run as well as in the long run. The results empirically establish the relationship between the insurance industry and economic growth in India post-liberalization. The results could help policymakers to focus on enhancing the insurance industry’s performance in India to achieve higher economic growth. The existing literature on how insurance consumption and economic growth are related is focused on developed economies. It ignores the non-life insurance segment of the industry and has not taken a long time period to get a complete picture of the interrelationship. This is a novel attempt to investigate the causal relation between economic growth and the insurance industry’s growth in post-liberalized India.

Do health care companies of India fulfil government’s new orientation towards CSR activities

Purpose Corporate social responsibility (CSR) in India includes education, environment, healthcare and rural development. In post-liberalized India, the healthcare sector (services and facilities) has grown in leaps and bounds over last two decades. The purpose of this paper is to reveal and explain the CSR profile of select healthcare companies of India and reveal gaps and scope of healthcare activities with a special consideration towards maternal health. Design/methodology/approach Primary data are collected from seven listed companies of Goa state which were willing to participate in the study. In total, 67 companies constituting the Healthcare Sector Index of Standard & Poor of the Bombay Stock Exchange are considered as secondary source. Data of 59 companies that come within the threshold of Companies Act, 2013, are studied. CSR guidelines (with a turnover of Rs 10bn or a market capitalization of Rs 5bn or a net profit of Rs 50m) are taken as an initial frame of reference. Findings In total, 89.83 per cent of these companies have initiatives related to health care. Structured companies (contribute to the company’s overall mission and goals) with CSR policy have committee size varying from three to five directors with an independent director. During 2016–2017, they were mandated to spend Rs 4.2613bn out of which only 74.59 per cent was spent. Geographical spread of CSR initiatives is skewed, with majority of companies focussing on the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat, whereas the states of Odisha and North-Eastern being neglected. The focus areas of CSR are education, healthcare and rural development. The variation of MMR in different states of India is an indicator for corporate as to which state needs more attention. The corporate sector in India needs to focus on SDG3 target of MMR and move towards a newer dimension and direction. Originality/value The originality of this paper lies in the recognition of the initiative of Government of India of weaning out CSR activities outside the purview of business sense and towards instilling a social sense in company behaviour. This is a dimensional and directional change in the evolution of CSR practices in companies and countries. To this end, 59 healthcare sector companies under the threshold of Companies Act 2013 were studied and results were outlined.

The Modernity of Caste and the Market Economy

AbstractWhat place does the caste system have in modern India with its globally integrating market economy? The most influential anthropological approaches to caste have tended to emphasize caste as India's traditional religious and ritual order, or (treating such order as a product of the colonial encounter) as shaped politically, especially today by the dynamics of caste-based electoral politics. Less attention has been paid to caste effects in the economy. This article argues that the scholarly framing of caste mirrors a public-policy ‘enclosure’ of caste in the non-modern realm of religion and ‘caste politics’, while aligning modernity to the caste-erasing market economy. Village-level fieldwork in South India finds a parallel public narrative of caste either as ritual rank eroded by market relations or as identity politics deflected from everyday economic life. But, locally and nationally, the effects of caste are found to be pervasive in labour markets and the business economy. In the age of the market, caste is a resource, sometimes in the form of a network, its opportunity-hoarding advantages discriminating against others. Dalits are not discriminated by caste as a set of relations separate from economy, but by the very economic and market processes through which they often seek liberation. The caste processes, enclosures, and evasions in post-liberalization India suggest the need to rethink the modernity of caste beyond orientalist and post-colonial frameworks, and consider the presuppositions that shape understanding of an institution, the nature and experience of which are determined by the inequalities and subject positions it produces.

The expanded state in contemporary India: counterinsurgency and the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the ‘expanded state’ in post-liberalisation India within the context of official responses to the Maoist insurgency in rural central and eastern India. I analyse a scheme called the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship, which was launched as part of the central government’s attempt to wean ordinary men and women away from Maoist insurgents through rural development. Under this scheme, young women and men are appointed to assist state officials in implementing rural development programmes in districts classified as ‘Left-Wing Extremist’. What does the institution and practice of this fellowship tell us about the state in India today in the context of counterinsurgency and beyond? I address this question on the basis of ethnographic fieldwork in an erstwhile Maoist district in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. By closely shadowing the everyday work of one Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellow (PMRDF), I show how the PMRDF is located outside the state, and yet constitutes the state. By focussing on the role of the PMRDF, I reveal one of the many new configurations of the state that are emerging in India today.

‘Below English Line’: An ethnographic exploration of class and the English language in post-liberalization India

AbstractAnthropological studies of India's post-liberalization middle classes have tended to focus mainly on the role of consumption behaviour in the constitution of this class group. Building on these studies, and taking class as an object of ethnographic enquiry, I argue that, over the last 20 years, class dynamics in the country have been significantly altered by the unprecedentedly important and complex role that the English language has come to play in the production and reproduction of class. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork—conducted at commercial spoken-English training centres, schools, and corporate organizations in Bangalore—I analyse the processes by which this change in class dynamics has occurred, and how it is experienced on the ground. I demonstrate how, apart from being a valuable type of class cultural capital in its own right, proficiency in English has come to play a key role in the acquisition and performance of other important forms of capital associated with middle-class identity. As a result, being able to demonstrate proficiency in English has come to be experienced as a critical element in claiming and maintaining a space in the middle class, regardless of the other types of class cultural capital a person possesses.