Priya Deshingkar

Grounding the State: Devolution and Development in India's Panchayats

Decentralisation is commonly defended on the grounds that it will bring government closer to people, thereby creating political structures that are more transparent and accountable to poor and marginal groups in society. However, a problem that is well recognised in the decentralisation literature is that the devolution of power will not necessarily improve the performance and accountability of local government. Indeed, in many cases, decentralisation simply empowers local elites to capture a larger share of public resources, often at the expense of the poor. Reflecting on these relatively long-standing problems, an important strand of scholarship has argued that central government can play a central role in counterbalancing the forces that tend to disfavour the poor. In this article, we aim to inform this scholarship by reflecting on the interface between local government and local people in two Indian States: Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Madhya Pradesh (MP). Drawing upon 12 months of primary research, we argue that although the government of AP did not devolve power to the extent that proponents of decentralisation would have liked, its populist approach to certain forms of poverty reduction empowered the poor in ways that the more ambitious decentralisation agenda in MP did not. This, we argue, was due in part to the fact that MPs decentralisation process failed to challenge the well-entrenched power of the village chiefs, the sarpanches. But the discrepancy can also be explained in terms of the historical evolution of ‘development populism’ in AP. In particular, we argue that the strong performance of programmes aimed at subsidising rice for low income households and providing credit to womens ‘self-help groups’ (SHGs) was part of the State governments wider political strategy of enhancing and maintaining electoral support among women, scheduled castes and the poor.

Environmental risk, resilience and migration: implications for natural resource management and agriculture

This letter probes the causal links between migration, remittances and resilience to environmental change. Three case studies have been chosen, Western Mexico, the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso and Eastern India, where satellite imagery shows recent regeneration of vegetative cover and where there is evidence of high rates of migration. The findings are analysed through a framework that draws on concepts of ecological anthropology, new economics of labour theories and livelihood analyses of migration drivers and impacts.

Extending Labour Inspections to the Informal Sector and Agriculture

Labour inspections could, in theory, improve labour standards and help countries move towards decent work goals and the elimination of chronic poverty. But, in practice, inspections are either not conducted or do not result in penalties for those who break the law. Using the case of India, and examining labour contracts and standards in selected informal agricultural and non-agricultural occupations, the author identifies the reasons for this state of affairs: corrupt and under-resourced labour departments; subcontracting arrangements where employer–employee relationships are difficult to prove; little political commitment to improving labour standards; and poor coverage of new categories of work by existing labour laws. The paper also documents how, in the absence of an effective labour inspection machinery, civil society organisations and the media have successfully mobilised consumers and NGOs in the West to put pressure on suppliers in global value chains to improve labour standards and eliminate child labour. [Working Paper No. 154]

Towards contextualised, disaggregated and intersectional understandings of migration in India

New patterns of mobility are continuously shaping and being shaped by macro processes of liberalisation and capitalism on the one hand and local processes embedded in culture, class, ethnicity and race on the other hand. India is no exception and new transregional alliances as well as actors and institutions are shaping the ‘power geometry’ (Massey, 1993) of migration by determining who migrates, why, where and under what circumstances. There has been an increase in certain forms of migrant labour such as construction work, care work and industrial labour or, what Sassen (2001) calls the ‘real work’ of modern societies. But these new configurations of mobility, particularly those of poorer social groups are inadequately addressed in migration theory and policy in India. Part of the reason for this is that theories have not been revisited based on emerging empirical evidence. Another reason is the scalar politics of migration that invisibilises the poor and their experiences of migrant labour markets. In other words the state and its institutions in India have different approaches to different categories of migrants according to their socio-spatial positioning; the uneducated poor, whose journeys are mainly local or into peripheral spaces, have not received the same attention as the educated classes who move longer distances into formal jobs and urban centres. It can be speculated that the underlying causes for these differences are closely linked to caste, tribe, religion and gender-based power relations. A third reason is the tendency of the public and policy discourse on migration into low-paid work to draw on cross-sectional analysis at a single point in time rather than taking into account longitudinal dynamics over the life-course of migrants. There is a need to challenge these perceptions with new evidence on the specificities of migration through contextualised and intersectional analyses. With this objective in mind, this commentary discusses emerging evidence about the experience of migrant construction workers. Such migration is of huge current significance all over the world and also in India. Construction work and brick kiln work together employ millions of adults worldwide and, according to WIEGO (2016) at least 30 million in India. The significance of this work derives from the fact that it is abundantly available in larger towns and cities and barriers to entry are low; formal education is not needed. I start with the conceptual underpinnings that are often employed in the Indian discourse on migration for construction work and how these convey a lopsided view of migration. One example is the concept of ‘footloose labour’ (Breman, 1996), a term