The article documents some of the transformations to the women’s movement in India in the post-independence period. Given the empirical and ideological centrality of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in the terrain of Indian feminism, the article focuses on dominant feminist responses...

The decision to carry out a caste-based census in India in order to, among other things, get a more scientific basis for reservations has generated considerable debate. Much of this debate has focused on data quality, without much attention paid to the question of what should be the scientific...

This article seeks to contribute to an understanding of the dynamics of religion in social mobilization. It argues that existing approaches to the study of the role of religion in social mobilization have been insufficiently nuanced and have failed to probe the multiple and often contradictory...

Many state-led development policies in India are formulated for tribal communities who are deemed ‘backward’. The institutionalization of such ethnic categorizations through development policies reflects a tendency to homogenize communities (especially numerically small ones) who...

On 24 April 2013, Rana Plaza, a nine-storey building that housed five garment factories, a commercial bank and several retail shops, collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people. Had Bangladesh’s well-regarded building code been enforced, the tragedy would never have occurred. Through an...

This article revisits 50 years of the development trajectory of India’s Kerala state, well known for its human development attainments. To put the discussion in perspective we use a conceptual framework integrating growth, inequality and well-being. Long accustomed to a low per capita...

This article considers Munda–Muslim negotiations in the social and power context of the advent of new irrigation technology in contemporary Barind, Bangladesh. These negotiations have been made possible since the 1990s following the installation of deep tube wells (DTWs) for irrigation...

Literature on India’s software and information technology services (SWIS) sector is doubtful about any positive impact on wider development because it finds that the sector’s forward and backward linkages predominantly lead abroad. Using new data, this article re-evaluates the...

With the rise of India and other Southern engines of growth, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and similar vehicles for South–South regional cooperation have gained in importance. Developing a stochastic frontier gravity model, this article investigates the...

The study identifies socio-economic determinants of livelihood choices of rural households in Bangladesh (4,195 households from 139 villages) by applying a multinomial logit model of occupational choice and a multivariate Tobit model that allows for jointness in decision making. Results reveal...