Book Description

How should governance be made more accountable and transparent? The book, wide-ranging and panoramic in content, seeks to intellectually confront the provocative question and explore, in the process, the highly elusive and controversial theme of democratic governance. It conceptualizes and contextualises the theme in the Indian context in terms of certain specific parameters and clues. The book contains contribution from a wide section of leading commentators, having long years of experience in teaching and research, who also have governance as their major or emerging area of interest. Followed by a lucid introduction which problematises the theme in general terms, the contributions in the book concern as diverse sub-themes as social capital, democratic decentralization, urban governance, rural governance, policy outcomes, mass upsurge corporate governance. The contributions, as the title of the book indicates, are a mixed bag of reflections on and refractions of democratic governance in India. They also contain refractions in the sense of revealing the 'bends' at particular points of the trajectory of the process. The book will complement the ongoing debate on democratic governance and will be a standard reference for the researchers, analysts and students of social science. It should also be valuable to the policymakers who wish to receive analytical and critical feedback on governance.