This paper contends that the constitutional value of political justice should guide the forthcoming constituency delimitation and seat apportionment. Prevailing debates centred on the “North–South” divide have obscured a parallel and serious concern: gerrymandering. Neither gerrymandering nor malapportionment can be adequately addressed through political compromise; both require constitutionally grounded solutions. Political justice, understood through the principles of sharedness and effective representation, provides a normative framework for apportionment and remedying partisan boundary-making. The paper addresses two gaps: it proposes a constitutional value to orient future delimitation exercises and clarifies the substantive content of political justice as a constitutional commitment.
Policies must harness measures in trade, plant breeding and protection, and crop husbandry.
Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance By Karthik Muralidharan India Viking, 2024, 832 pages
Indore’s recent drinking water crisis reveals the widening gap between performative urban governance and the realities of basic service provisioning in Indian cities. As Indian cities compete through rankings and certifications, the reliability of essential infrastructures such as drinking water systems remains precarious increasing vulnerabilities for the urban poor. This raises crucial questions about the institutional, financial, and governance constraints faced by Urban Local Bodies in managing urban drinking water systems.
Being a South Asian scholar differs from being a scholar in South Asia. The former refers to a disciplinary identity—someone who studies South Asia—and the latter a geo-political and cultural space where a scholar is located. While drawing attention to the difficulty of being a scholar in South Asia, this article attempts to write an intellectual biography of the foremost Kannada literary critic and theorist, D R Nagaraj (1954-98), who died in his intellectual harness at the age of forty-four. His last monograph, Allamaprabhu mattu Shaiva Pratibhe (1999), published posthumously, is a landmark critical work that engages with the medieval Shaiva mystic Allama and his dialogue with pan-Indian philosophical traditions such as Kashmir Shaivism and other local traditions. It is indeed an ambitious work to come from a scholar in South Asia, but it did not culminate without any effort and struggles; it involved a long and arduous journey in the short life of Nagaraj. Therefore, it is useful to understand how he arrived at this ambition? How did his early stint as a literary critic transform into a postcolonial thinker and practitioner with a difference? While answering these questions, the present article tries to recreate the biographical and intellectual milieu this Kannada critic inherited.
This essay reflects on the contemporary workplace as a cultural text, drawing attention to the quiet practices through which leadership and authority are shaped in everyday organisational life. Using the metaphor of errata and corrections, it considers how women leaders are frequently subjected to ongoing, informal revisions - of tone, language, timing, and presence - even after formal leadership roles are attained. These corrections rarely appear as explicit exclusions; instead, they are framed as guidance, refinement, or professionalism. What feels distinctive today is the timing of such correction, which increasingly accompanies entry into leadership rather than following years of authority. The essay traces the emotional and cognitive work involved in navigating these expectations, highlighting the gap between formal commitments to inclusion and the informal norms that govern legitimacy at work. By focusing on what is quietly edited rather than publicly declared, the piece invites reflection on how power operates through everyday forms of correction in professional settings.
The ongoing “China+1” sentiment presents India with an opportunity to attract manufacturing investments relocating from China. By doing so, India aims to bolster its domestic manufacturing industry and establish itself as a global manufacturing and export hub. Worldwide, nations aggressively compete to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) by offering various incentives, and India is no exception. This study aims to determine the impact of FDI on India’s manufacturing exports and analyse the mechanisms through which FDI influences India’s exports. The findings suggest that FDI helps to reduce supply-side barriers to India’s exports by enhancing productive capacity. However, there is no evidence that positive FDI spillovers affect manufacturers’ exports. The paper presents recommendations to policymakers.
The National Statistical Office's revision of India's National Accounts Statistics from base year 2011-12 to 2022-23 constitutes one of the most consequential overhauls of the country's macroeconomic measurement framework in recent decades. This paper examines the principal changes in estimation methodology, data sources, and classificatory frameworks introduced under the new series. The revision leverages transformative data ecosystems that emerged after 2011-12—most notably the Goods and Services Tax Network, the upgraded MCA21 Version 3 corporate database, the Periodic Labour Force Survey, and the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey 2022-23. The paper systematically reviews changes in the estimation of Gross Domestic Product by production and expenditure approaches, Gross Value Added by economic activity, Private Final Consumption Expenditure, Gross Fixed Capital Formation, saving and capital formation, and Quarterly Estimates of GDP. The analysis finds that the revision has led to notable changes in the structural composition of the economy, the measured savings-investment balance, and the trajectory of quarterly growth, with significant implications for macroeconomic policy analysis and international comparability.
The Aspirational Districts Programme was launched by NITI Aayog in 2018 with the aim of uplifting India’s 112 least socio-economically performing districts. This study employs beta and sigma convergence approaches to investigate the program’s effectiveness in reducing inter-district income disparities across all 24 districts using real income data from 2011 to 2022. The results indicate both sigma and beta divergence over the full study period. However, sub-period analyses based on pre and post program implementation reveal divergent results. While sigma divergence persists, but evidence shows beta convergence. Further, there is deceleration in sigma divergence. These findings suggest that ADP may contribute to reducing inter-districts income disparities and align with the government objectives. The study has both theoretical and empirical implications for researchers and policy makers.
This piece explores the dichotomy between the economic and political condition of the Bengali Muslim (also known ‘Miya’) community of Assam within the context of labour exploitation. It briefly traces the political economy of colonial-era Assam, which shaped the community’s early labour exchange value before identifying key transformative shifts in the postcolonial period, which encouraged the community to diversify their labour value but also pushed them towards greater social and political precarity. We mainly argue that the Bengali Muslim’s labour value, recognised by large sections of the Assamese elite as key to Assam’s economic development, hasn’t automatically aided their social inclusion. The Miya labourer remains stuck in an intensifying framework of racialised exploitation, social marginalisation and political disenfranchisement. They continue to be other-ised as ‘illegal foreigners’ and demographic threats to Assamese society. Finally, we highlight some of the propositions for a ‘work permit regime’ that both liberals and conservatives among the Assamese elite have put forward from time to time as a solution to the ‘illegal immigration’ problem, and argue how they reify the racialised and inhumane regime of labour exploitation that the Bengali Muslim have historically been subjected to.
This paper critically examines the normative ambiguities embedded in the definition of "wages" under the Code on Wages, 2019, with particular focus on the first proviso to Section 2(y). It argues that the definitional framework, while seeking uniformity across labour codes, introduces a problematic classification that lacks a clear rational nexus and may result in unequal access to statutory benefits among similarly situated employees. This classification not only raises concerns regarding constitutional equality under Article 14 but also creates compliance uncertainties for employers by imposing additional regulatory burdens. The paper contends that such ambiguities undermine legal certainty and coherence, two fundamental tenets of labour legislation. It therefore advocates for a comprehensive reconsideration and redrafting of the wage definition by the Central Government to align the Code with constitutional mandates and the broader objectives of equity and social justice in labour law.
Despite boosting Indigenous tenure security for economic, social and ecological development and sustainability, some Indigenous communities or Adivasi peoples in India are aspired to seek tenure to access welfare state benefits. The state’s neoliberal cash transfer mechanism engenders natural consciousness among Adivasi peoples that narrows comprehensive rights framework to mere land distribution scheme. This techno-patrimonialism produces three critical problems: it diminishes rights-based tenure governance; establishes Adivasi subjectivity while reinforcing hierarchical and hegemonic governance structures; and damages local ecosystems by alienating communities from their traditional environmental stewardship roles. This creates "reverse-environmentality” wherein state mechanisms transform potential environmental stewards into neoliberal agents of nature. For meaningful change, there is need for transformative tenure governance founded on democratic principles that address distributional, procedural, and recognitional justice in tenure reforms, particularly in non-scheduled areas where Adivasi groups exist as scattered invisible minorities.
This paper examines recent trends in corporate concentration in India’s non-financial sector, with a focus on developments since 2015. Using firm-level data from the CMIE Prowess database we document changes in asset and income distribution across firms. We find that while the overall decline in the public sector’s share of assets and income contributed to a reduction in measured concentration in earlier years, this was accompanied by a steady increase in the share held by the top five private business groups. Through a decomposition exercise, the analysis shows that the increase in income share for these groups was primarily on account of an increase in their share of total assets and total debt. This occurred during a period when many other firms reduced their leverage, particularly after the implementation of the Reserve Bank of India’s Asset Quality Review. The paper provides descriptive evidence on changes in firm-level borrowing patterns and financial indicators, and links them with the differences in financial conditions across the firms.
