Mid-term Appraisal Eleventh Five Year Plan, 2007-2012


Book Description

This report reviews the experience in the first three years of the Eleventh Plan (2007-2012) and identifies sectors where corrective steps may be needed to ensure that growth is broad-based and inclusive.




Ethics for Governance


Book Description

This book provides a comprehensive overview of India’s public services and bureaucratic systems, and explores why widespread corruption and inefficient delivery have slowed development. It: discusses the underlying reasons for the prevailing inefficiency in public services; examines the complex linkages between ethics-based public service, India’s cultural and spiritual heritage, and its current economic development model; and outlines ways to create an ethics code and an environment that is conducive to better administration and good governance. Lucid, accessible, and meticulously researched, this will prove essential to scholars and students of public administration, governance studies and political science, particularly bureaucrats, policy-makers and civil service aspirants.




Citizenship and Its Discontents


Book Description

Breaking new ground in scholarship, Niraja Jayal writes the first history of citizenship in the largest democracy in the world—India. Unlike the mature democracies of the west, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own policies of inclusion. Citizenship and Its Discontents explores a century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the present, analyzing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and as identity. The early optimism that a new India could be fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a formally inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and weak solidarity. Once seen by Western political scientists as an anomaly, India today is a site where every major theoretical debate about citizenship is being enacted in practice, and one that no global discussion of the subject can afford to ignore.




A Frayed History


Book Description

Once the envy of the world for its quality and variety, Indian cotton today is mired in uncertainty and despair. Though India is the largest producer of cotton, its farmers are trapped in debt, and thousands choose to kill themselves than face an ignominious fate. Handloom weavers, once proud standard-bearers of the country's artisanal heritage, are barely able to scrape together a living. To make matters worse, there is the back-breaking competition with artificial fibres. Meena Menon and Uzramma take us through the fascinating history of cotton in India, examining its illustrious origins, its blood-stained colonial heritage, and the events that led to its current crisis. Amid the bleakness, the authors suggest a silver lining: reviving indigenous cotton—and the handloom industry that spun its fame. Through painstaking research, Menon and Uzramma show that with the right combination of friendly policies and championing the Indian cotton brand, it is possible to restore the fabric's past glory. This is an important book not just for lovers of cotton but anyone concerned with the struggles of Indian agriculture in a brutal, fast-changing market.




Future of Cities


Book Description

This book critically analyses the existing condition of cities in developing countries with special reference to planning and infrastructure networks in India. It provides an overview of the nature of opportunities presented by cities; major challenges that cities would face in future; and codifies the ways and means to transcend the challenges of contemporary urban growth and quality of urbanisation. It discusses key themes such as architecture of density, transformation of land-use zones to development zones, development of railway infrastructure, planning and design guidelines for bus rapid transit, and urban water planning and universal access to housing to create an enabling environment for deliberations and a better future for cities in the developing world. The book integrates insights from governance, planning, and design and highlights implications of spatial integration. It brings together current issues in Indian urbanisation, smart technologies used in building smart cities and high-rises, and urban and regional governance to explore forms of sustainable development planning that factor human needs. Accessible and topical, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of urban studies, urban and city planning, development studies, sociology, public policy and administration, political sociology, anthropology, architecture, geography, and economics, as well as to professionals, planners, policymakers, and non-governmental organisations.




Achieving Education for All through Public–Private Partnerships?


Book Description

Concern for achieving Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 has led to a focus on the role that non-state providers (NSPs) can offer in extending access and improving quality of basic services. While NSPs can help to fill a gap in provision to those excluded from state provision, recent growth in both for-profit and not-for-profit providers in developing countries has sometimes resulted in fragmentation of service delivery. To address this, attention is increasingly given in the education sector to developing ‘partnerships’ between governments and NSPs. Partnerships are further driven by the expectation that the state has the moral, social, and legal responsibility for overall education service delivery and so should play a role in facilitating and regulating NSPs. Even where the ultimate aim of both non-state providers and the state is to provide education of acceptable quality to all children, this book provides evidence from diverse contexts across Africa, South Asia, and Latin America to highlight the challenges in them partnering to achieve this. This book was published as a special issue of Development in Practice.




Sustainable Management of Land Resources


Book Description

The depletion of land resources is one of the greatest challenges for mankind in this millennium. Shrinking land resources, weather aberrations, deterioration of land quality, and the globalization and liberalization of market economies have become intertwined to influence the sustainable management of land resources and land use plans. This important volume, Sustainable Management of Land Resources: An Indian Perspective, addresses these challenges. This comprehensive volume, covering important research, much of it gathered with the use of new technology, tools, and applications, is organized into four sections: (add bullets) land resource inventory and characterization geospatial technologies in land resource mapping and management soil nutrient status and management land use planning and livelihood security The volume looks at how scientists translate their knowledge and experience in sustainable land resources and management into implementable policy decisions, with a particular focus on India. Since India is an agrarian economy, the land resources assume a very critical role affecting the livelihood of a vast majority of populace in the country. The information gathered—and the methods by which it is gathered—is applicable globally. This comprehensive publication will be highly useful for the researchers, academicians, extension workers, policymakers, planners, officials of land resources survey, planning and management institutions/agencies/departments, and others.




Education and Empowerment in India


Book Description

This book explores the critical linkages between education and empowerment of women, marginalized groups and other disadvantaged sections of society. It: Provides an overview of educational policies and practices from India’s independence to the present day, and tracks relevant changes and amendments. Examines a range of issues connected with education such as the Right to Education Act; empowerment and community mobilization; higher education challenges and other emerging topics. Brings together both theoretical postulates and empirical findings.




The Routledge Atlas of South Asian Affairs


Book Description

South Asia has developed from a group of newly independent post-Colonial states of at most secondary importance to the wider world to its current position as a region of central strategic importance to both global economic development and world peace and stability. This Atlas highlights the global significance of South Asia in relation to economic, geopolitical and strategic interests. It provides a coherent descriptive and analytical account of the key elements of the complex societies that make up the region and its component countries. Illustrated with more than 100 original maps and offering concise entries on key issues, the book is structured thematically in these sections: Global Context Geographical Environments Historical Evolution of South Asia Key Issues in modern South Asia Economy and Security Designed for use in teaching undergraduate and graduate classes and seminars in geography, history, economics, anthropology, international relations, political science and the environment as well as regional courses on the South Asia, this book is also a comprehensive reference source for libraries and decision makers focusing on South Asia.




The Human Right to Water


Book Description

The discourse on the human right to water presents deliberations on the concept, content and rationale for the right, with little attention to the practical question of translating the right into reality. This book aims to fill this void by focusing on ‘realization’ of the right by its holders, examining how effective the mechanisms are for ‘implementing’ the right in enabling its universal realization. In a quest to answer this question, the book draws a conceptual differentiation between ‘implementation’ and ‘realization’ of the right, arguing that unlike implementation - which is an objective process of creation and implementation of measures such as legal frameworks, institutional structures or policy and action guidelines, realization of the right is a subjective process that extends much beyond. It takes shape within specific contextual settings which may include varied situations, yet remains neglected in the related academic and action forums. This book attempts to address this void by discussing some of the most significant contexts and the underlying problems and concerns that strongly influence realization of the human right to water. It contends that if the right is to be truly realized, these different contexts - which can be further classified as 'objective' and 'subjective' - must be understood, analysed and appropriately addressed before framing and implementing relevant action. The book further situates the human right to water discourse in a broader interdisciplinary perspective, expanding its scope beyond the narrower legal dimensions, linking it to the wider field of water resources management/governance. Through the novel ideas it proposes, the book makes an innovative and unique contribution in the field of human right to water which is of great scientific value.