This article examines the Supreme Court’s judgement in Association for Democratic Reforms & Others v. Election Commission of India delivered on 27 May 2026 as a post facto validation of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll undertaken by the Election Commission of India (ECI). We argue that by affirming an exceptional exercise of preparing the electoral roll de novo, the Supreme Court has interpreted the ECI’s constitutional mandate in a way which has the potential to set boundaries to the right of citizens to vote. By deciding that the ongoing modality of revising the electoral roll is constitutional, the Supreme Court has confirmed the mutation of a process designed to give material form to the democratic ideal of universal suffrage into a politically charged practice. In this shift, the electoral roll has been transformed into a political artefact embedded in a politics of non-citizenship and banal statism, whereby the political regime manoeuvres the bureaucratic apparatus of the state to make the right to vote dependent on identification regimes devised by the state.
The beedi industry forms a significant segment of India’s informal economy, providing work to millions, most of them women and children from disadvantaged groups, who endure harsh and uncertain conditions. Among the leading centres of this industry is Murshidabad district in West Bengal, yet little is known about the intertwined socio-economic, health, and systemic challenges of its workforce. This study explores the multidimensional vulnerabilities of beedi workers by combining quantitative prioritisation of challenges with qualitative insights into their lived realities. A mixed-methods concurrent design was adopted involving 245 beedi workers from seven blocks in Murshidabad. Quantitative data were collected using a 7-point Likert questionnaire, prioritised using Garrett’s ranking technique. Qualitative data were derived from in-depth interviews and group discussions, thematically analysed to capture workers’ perceptions and coping strategies. Health issues emerged as the top concern (mean Garrett score: 63.24), followed by insufficient income (55.55) and long working hours (53.87), with substandard social status ranking lowest (38.31). Qualitative narratives uncovered deep-rooted issues such as exploitation by middlemen, social marginalisation, gender-specific burdens, the persistence of child labour, and the many hurdles workers face in accessing welfare schemes, all of which exacerbate cycles of poverty and illness. By integrating worker voices with structured ranking, this research informs evidence-based policies to improve livelihoods in India’s unorganised beedi sector. To truly protect the health, dignity, and livelihoods of these workers, there is an urgent need for targeted policy measures, stronger enforcement of labour rights, and welfare programmes tailored to local realities.
Social well-being plays an important role in the achievement of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Social well-being is directly influenced by all 17 goals aimed at creating a sustainable, inclusive, and equitable future. Assessing the progress of ASEAN countries towards social well-being is critical for policy direction, considering the SDG targets of 2030. This study employs Holt’s forecasting model to estimate the progress of ASEAN countries on 20 selected social indicators related to the SDGs, using data from the UN Sustainable Development Global Database for the years 2000 to 2023. This study tries to offer evidence-based perspectives on whether ASEAN nations are on course to achieve the SDGs relating to social issues by 2030. This study provides a fresh, data-driven prediction of SDG results, combining technical developments and regional collaboration to suggest workable solutions.
The declining share of millets in India’s food systems from 22.2 per cent of total food grain production in 1950–1951 to around 6 per cent in recent years not only altered agrarian economies but also disrupted the ritual and cosmological worlds of indigenous (tribal) communities. This article investigates the socio-cultural significance of millet among the Kutia Kandha, a particularly vulnerable tribal group of Kandhamal and Kalahandi districts, Odisha. It poses the questions how does millet function as a ritual medium through which social relations, gendered identities, and ecological ethics are produced and reproduced? How are these practices changing under the pressures of market integration, outmigration, and state-led millet revival? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and ritual economy framework, it shows that millet operates simultaneously as a subsistence grain, a ritual offering to Dharni Penu (the Earth Goddess), and a gendered knowledge system in which women are primary custodians of seeds, songs, and sacred practice. The article demonstrates that while generational shifts and market forces are eroding millet-based practices, state interventions such as the Odisha Millet Mission (OMM) have had uneven reach among subsistence-level households. The study’s originality lies in its insider ethnographic positioning conducted in Kui by a researcher from Kandhamal and in its contribution to debates on indigenous food sovereignty, ritual economy, and decolonial approaches to sustainable development, including the UN Sustainable Development Goal on Zero Hunger (SDG 2).
During the last three decades, health systems globally have faced rising inequities in access to health services and a rise in the cost of care. The neoliberal health sector reforms of the 1980s and 1990s commercialised public systems and enlarged spaces for the market. Low- and low–middle-income countries were most affected by the health reforms, and the COVID-19 pandemic further weakened health systems in the Global South. Recognising the rising inequities and weak primary health care, there is an effort to correct the inequities.
Like our society, our health system also remains fragmented. Fragmentation is linked to structural issues of the health system, like how care is financed and organised. Fragmentation at the level of health system design plays out in the daily lives of people who access healthcare in the form of high financial burden, incomplete care, and high levels of unmet health needs. An attempt has been made to study the key drivers of fragmentation across the three prominent models of pooled health financing across various domains. While government-funded health insurance (GFHI) is being promoted as the most appropriate mechanism to address health system fragmentation, evidence suggests that the current GFHIs remain ineffective, whereas government-financed and publicly provided and social health insurance demonstrate greater promise despite systemic weaknesses.
Understanding the drivers of livelihood vulnerability is essential for promoting sustainable development in marginalised rural areas. This study examines the socio-economic and infrastructural determinants of household-level livelihood vulnerability among tribal communities in Jharkhand, India. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines the composite livelihood vulnerability index (CLVI), multiple linear Regression, and qualitative fieldwork, the study analyses primary data from 400 households. The CLVI reveals moderate yet structurally embedded vulnerability (0.539), with climate variability as the dominant contributor. Regression analysis identifies a high dependency ratio, distress migration, chronic illness, informal borrowing, and the absence of irrigation and sanitation as key vulnerability drivers, while education and self-help group membership serve as protective factors. Qualitative narratives foreground community experiences, revealing dimensions of vulnerability that indices alone cannot capture. Building adaptive capacity is essential to securing long-term resilience and sustainable livelihoods for tribal households facing socio-economic and environmental challenges.
Women street vendors choose their street vending for multiple obligations, ranging from domestic, social, and economic reasons. They often come from socio-economically disadvantaged groups who run their family with meagre amount of daily earnings from their self-employed endeavour. The present exploratory case study tries to investigate the experience of women street vendors with respect to their personal motives, infrastructures, vending sites, daily earnings, institutional entitlements, and challenges they face in their daily lives. Eighty women street vendors were interviewed in Gauhati, using semi-structured questionnaires. Findings of the study indicate that women street vendors are institutionally unentitled, socially and economically vulnerable, and experience multidimensional challenges during their street vending. They need better access to skill education, gender-sensitive workspace, and financial management. Thus, the article calls for an institutional policy framework to provide education, proper vending sites, transportation, and social security to make street vending gender-sensitive.
Traditional performing arts such as dance, music, and folk theatre have historically anchored rural Indian society, serving as both cultural expression and livelihood sustenance. This article aims to critically examine the lived experiences of Jatra practitioners in Odisha, a predominantly migratory and informally employed community within the performing arts sector. The analysis examines vulnerabilities and coping strategies of the community amid unforeseen shocks. The methodology consist of telephonic interviews conducted during the pandemic and a nine-month ethnographic study thereafter, supplemented by secondary data from print, electronic, and digital media. The findings reveal systemic socio-economic insecurity, exacerbated by inadequate social protection mechanisms. The absence of official data on Jatra workers remains a critical barrier to informed policy formulation. The study highlights the urgent need for a baseline socio-economic survey for inclusive, evidence-based interventions such as artist registration, wage regulation, universal healthcare access, skill development, gender-equity mechanisms, and investment in cultural infrastructure.
This special issue can be located within the renewed and growing body of social science research that critiques the dominant discourses on collective action that privilege organised, visible, and overt political movements. By drawing on political economy, feminist, queer, and ethnographic scholarship, the contributions to this issue highlight the apparently less legible modes of collective action that often unfold in everyday contexts. The six empirical articles span varied arenas, such as rural and urban, ecological and cultural, and historical and contemporary, while remaining analytically linked by their focus on how collective action occurs under conditions in which political avenues are constrained, prohibited, or inaccessible. A commentary on air pollution and respiratory solidarities, alongside a conceptual review essay and four book reviews, further broadens the conversation in this special issue. Thus, collectively, this issue argues that everyday life is an important site where collective possibilities for social change are continuously negotiated.
Uber and Ola were launched in Indian cities a decade ago. This past decade has seen an unparalleled transformation of how the Indian public, its municipal governance bodies and the state as a regulatory body imagine city commute and public transportation in our cities. The much-celebrated introduction of the aggregators in the taxi sector of Indian cities, marketed as ‘disruption’, is a reality comprised of varied implications on the public, on the taxi drivers, on the municipal bodies and the state. In this article, based on the author’s decade-long engagement with the taxi sector-aggregator and the metered taxi, the paper focuses on the story of the taxi men onboard with the(se) platform(s), the multiplicity of collectives and unions as a result of their mobilisations. The article then pushes to discuss the challenges in their collective actions with respect to the aggregator companies to argue that this new form of work, that is, work in the platform economy, is leading to an emergence of a novel pattern of collective organisation and action for impactful resistance and dialogue.
Delhi’s atmosphere has been a site of policy and political debate alongside multiple interventions since the late 1990s. From fuel transition to emission norms, and from industrial closure to air quality monitoring, the city has been a laboratory for governance and technical innovations looking to infrastructure a less toxic urban atmosphere. This commentary takes this contemporary politics as its point of departure to examine how otherwise disparate publics have been brought together by a shared object of concern. Drawing on research undertaken within a broadly science and technology studies framing, the commentary identifies and describes the emergence of everyday subjectivities around air and their collective assertion, or respiratory solidarities. It further shows how post-pandemic social and political shifts have come to undermine these nascent forms of collective action around air.
The study examines beneficiary perceptions of government schemes in Jammu and Kashmir after the abrogation of Article 370. It adopted a cross-sectional survey of 960 educated rural and urban respondents. It assessed the perceptions of 21 pre-existing, modified, and new schemes on a five-point Likert scale. The findings reveal moderate satisfaction in both settings and significant differences between individual schemes. More positive reactions were observed for several pre-existing schemes, such as Khelo India and JKIDFC Projects, modified schemes, such as Integrated Social Security Scheme and Ladli Beti, and newly introduced schemes, such as PM-AJAY, Post-Matric Scholarship, Tejaswini, and Mumkin; however, perceptions varied across schemes, with some receiving moderate or low ratings. Infrastructure and social security schemes were preferred by rural respondents, whereas urban participants preferred skill development and entrepreneurship programmes. The lowest level of satisfaction was observed among rural government workers and unemployed urban residents. The analysis shows that rural–urban strategies should be customised, new plans should have realistic schedules, and the needs of unsatisfied occupational groups should be targetted.
