Feature Article

This paper examines whether any of India’s high-productivity, high-income growth in the services sector is occurring in rural India, and if so, to what extent. It addresses three questions: (a) While India has experienced high economic growth led by the services sector over the last decade, to what extent has rural structural transformation taken place? (b) How has the Indian services sector performed in the context of the General Agreement on Trade in Services and how is this reflected in rural India? (c) To what extent has the rural workforce gained from the IT revolution?

This paper takes the position that a useful governance perspective must be informed by the socio-economiccultural milieu, and in the specific Indian context must sit on a tripod of ”political reality”, ”state of decentralisation” and ”basic economic principles”. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region is one of the most important growth engines for India as it accrues tremendous revenues to the central and the Maharashtra state governments.

The fact that an economy, even when it experiences a higher growth rate in the capitalist segment, is saddled with an increasing unemployment rate, goes against the grain of conventional growth theory as indeed of the basic presumption underlying policymaking. In India, for instance, faced with growing misery in the midst of accelerating growth, the standard response has been that such “exclusion” will disappear if the growth rate can be further accelerated.

An analysis of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 and its interpretation by the courts shows that the holder or tenant of the land has suffered in major ways. It gives the government complete power to acquire land for any “public purpose” while the courts have virtually adopted a handsoff attitude and allowed all kinds of land acquisitions for private companies.

The post-199os economic boom in China is largely associated with an increasing rural-urban divide and a decline in formal wage employment in the urban sector. The case of workers in the Shenzhen special economic zone in south China is representative of this trend. When agriculture was deprioritised there was an exodus to the cities. The “peasant workers” in Shenzhen are forced to pay taxes and fees in their native villages but are not officially accepted as urban workers and cannot enjoy the urban-based facilities that the latter do.

A close examination of the ongoing debates on universal access to healthcare, both in national and international fora, reveals a plurality of ideological perspectives and motivations on how universal access can be achieved. This statement, issued at the end of a recent meeting of “participant observers”, brings their insights and concerns about universal access to healthcare.

The “authoritarianism vs democracy” divide in the ongoing anti-corruption movement is a false one. It conceals the real unity of interests between the authoritarian upper middle class elitist agenda and the political class supposedly defending Indian democracy today. Where do the poor figure here?

With a growing betel vine sector as well as thriving paddy cultivation and fishing, it is no wonder that villagers in Odisha’s Jagatsinghpur district have resisted the state government’s forceful acquisition of land for the POSCO project. Political parties of all shades as well as the intelligentsia are increasingly coming together in support of the agitation. The future of the anti-POSCO movement looks bright, but will it put an end to POSCO’s plan?

How the State has responded to the fasts of Anna Hazare, Baba Ramdev and Medha Patkar and how the media has portrayed them are a study in contrasts and say something about our society.

The Medical Council of India lurches from one crisis to another. (Editorial)