Search

Begin New Search Political Geography India Content Type Working Paper Publication Year within 10 Years Publication Year within 5 Years Publication Year within 25 Years

1. Factsheet: Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh (HSS)

Author:
Bridge Initiative Team
Publication Date:
01-2024
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Bridge Initiative, Georgetown University
Abstract:
Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh (HSS) is a right-wing Hindu non-profit organization registered in New Jersey. On its website, the group states its mission is “to organize a diverse and vibrant Hindu American society that can collectively address its challenges and contribute to the welfare of the world.” As of November 2023, HSS claims it has 220 Shakhas (branches) nationwide. HSS’s website venerates the early ideologues of Hindu nationalism, including those who praised Nazi Germany. Additionally, HSS has hosted prominent figures from the RSS, an Indian right-wing, Hindu nationalist, paramilitary volunteer organization.
Topic:
Far Right, Hindu Nationalism, and Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh (HSS)
Political Geography:
India, North America, and United States of America

2. Factsheet: Narendra Modi

Author:
Bridge Initiative Team
Publication Date:
01-2024
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Bridge Initiative, Georgetown University
Abstract:
Narendra Damodardas Modi is the current Prime Minister of India. He was the Chief Minister of Gujarat during the deadly 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in the state, and throughout his political career, he has promoted Hindu nationalist views. Under his leadership, India has experienced a rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes and hate speech, increasing polarization and violence in society, growing restrictions on the media, and the growth of Hindu nationalist groups. Critics and human rights experts have warned that under Modi’s leadership, democracy in India is under threat.
Topic:
Islamophobia, Narendra Modi, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Hindutva, and Hindu Nationalism
Political Geography:
India and Gujarat

3. India’s economic development since independence: An interpretative survey

Author:
Kunal Sen
Publication Date:
03-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
When India became a republic in 1950, the economy was primarily agrarian, with threefifths of output originating from agriculture. In the sixty years since independence, there has been a significant transformation of economic activity away from agriculture, with less than one-fifth of output now originating from agriculture and the rest from manufacturing and services. Since the 1980s, along with structural change, there has been strong economic growth, till 2010, followed by a period of declining growth. In this paper, we describe India’s economic foundation, paying particular interest to the processes of economic growth and structural change. We begin with a brief discussion of the patterns of growth and structural change since independence. We then discuss the economic policies that have underpinned India’s economic development. Next, we discuss the evolution of the three main economic sectors—agriculture, industry, and services. We then provide a summary of India’s regional performance. We end with a discussion of India’s economic performance in the post-2014 period.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Economic Growth, Economic Policy, and Industry
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

4. India’s development cooperation in Africa: The case of ‘Solar Mamas’ who bring light

Author:
Veda Vaidyanathan
Publication Date:
03-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
This paper examines multiple facets of New Delhi’s development cooperation with countries in Africa and argues that grassroots organizations in India that find innovative, low-cost technological solutions to developmental challenges can help governments and multilateral agencies craft inclusive, sustainable policies. The aim of this paper is threefold. First, to understand the major actors, instruments, themes, and mechanisms that make up India’s Development cooperation towards countries in Africa and how these usher in a new dimension of ‘South–South cooperation’. Second, the paper will explore the role of grassroots organizations that have found localized solutions in India that then export their learnings to other geographies and how they craft a unique role for themselves in India’s broader development cooperation framework. To explore this idea further, the paper will utilize the case study of a community-based grassroots organization, Barefoot College, Tilonia, founded by Sanjit Bunker Roy in 1972, and its solar programme. The college trains women from unelectrified, remote communities to become solar engineers who then return to their rural villages with the ability to harness solar power, earning them the title of ‘Solar Mamas’. Third, this paper argues that the uneven, fragmented Indian experience of designing development assistance programmes provides an important non-western perspective that can help decision makers craft policies for an era beyond aid.
Topic:
Development, International Cooperation, Science and Technology, Innovation, and Sustainability
Political Geography:
Africa and India

5. Fiscal dependence on extractive revenues: Measurement and concepts

Author:
Kyle McNabb
Publication Date:
03-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
The aims of this paper are twofold. It firstly identifies and discusses the extent to which public revenues from natural resources are adequately captured in existing cross-country revenue databases, before exploring the extent to which such data can be used to estimate countries’ fiscal dependence on extractives. I first discuss key conceptual, definitional and measurement issues, before comparing the coverage of key existing databases, notably the UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset (GRD). I then propose a new measure of fiscal dependence on extractive revenues (FDE). Whilst a number of existing studies have attempted to better quantify countries’ resource dependence, to the best of my knowledge none has yet proposed an indicator that ties the idea of dependence to any outcomes. The FDE simply calculates the extent to which extractive-producing countries can fund day-to-day government spending with non-extractive revenues. I find that the FDE is strongly correlated with existing measures of extractive dependence but can ultimately tell us more about countries’ fiscal positions and resulting vulnerability to shocks to revenue or government spending.
Topic:
Natural Resources, Tax Systems, Extractive Industries, and Economic Dependence
Political Geography:
Africa, South Asia, and India

6. India’s personal data protection act and the politics of digital governance

Author:
Stephen Weymouth
Publication Date:
05-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Atlantic Council
Abstract:
India recognizes the importance of establishing policy foundations for digital commerce, as cross-border data flows are essential to firms in all sectors, not just in technology. In manufacturing, three dimensional printing and robotics are revolutionizing production processes. Agriculture is benefiting from sensors and analytics, which optimize crop yields and resource usage. Healthcare is being transformed by electronic medical records, health information exchanges, and algorithms that analyze patient data and detect illness. Financial services are using blockchain technologies and AI to enable faster and more secure transactions. All industries rely on electronic payments, data analytics, and cloud storage to streamline various processes. With customers located worldwide, cross-border data flows are the byproduct of digital transactions. Data privacy frameworks can facilitate these flows by building consumer trust, thereby unlocking innovation and efficiency in all sectors. Given the significance of cross-border data flows to its economy, India has actively engaged in multilateral and bilateral discussions on digital trade governance. It is a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), a strategic forum comprising the United States, Japan, India, and Australia, a possible venue for coordination on digital governance. India has also joined the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), a US-led framework for economic cooperation which will facilitate conversations seeking “high-standard rules of the road in the digital economy, including standards on cross-border data flows and data localization.” The US-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET), launched by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden during the Quad summit in May 2022, presents an opportunity to build India-US trade ties through an industry-focused agenda. Finally, India and the United States have launched a new bilateral Defense Industrial Cooperation Roadmap to accelerate technological cooperation. This issue brief delves into the politics of India’s evolving digital governance, focusing on the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill of 2022 (DPDPB). The DPDPB aims to balance the interests of Indian consumers seeking enhanced privacy and data security against the business need for unconstrained data flows. The government’s responsive approach to stakeholder feedback on previous versions of the bill indicates that achieving these goals is feasible. However, concerns persist about ambiguities surrounding data transfers and institutional arrangements that exempt the government from complying with the law in ways that may encourage surveillance and censorship of opposing viewpoints.
Topic:
Economy, Business, Rule of Law, Data, and Data Governance
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

7. Tracking workers across generations – a cohort-based analysis

Author:
Rosa Abraham
Publication Date:
09-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University
Abstract:
Alongside rapid economic growth, India also saw steady de-agrarianisation of its economy in terms of contribution to GDP. In terms of employment, however, the movement out of agriculture was slower, and when they did exit, it was often a withdrawal from the workforce entirely. In general, more of the workforce are in salaried employment, however, these have filtered differently by gender, caste and religion. While cross-sectional data gives us a sense of how these structural changes affect workers at any given point in time, it cannot tell us how these play out for workers over their lifetime as well as how different generations or cohorts of workers have been affected. Here, we use seven rounds of nationally representative official data to construct cohorts who are tracked over these periods to observe employment participation and the patterns over time. We find that younger generations of women systematically less likely to be in paid employment whereas for men, after a certain age, generations look similar in terms of employment rate. Similarly, when examined from the perspective of cohorts, we find that access to salaried employment has changed by gender and caste, and increase in earnings over time over their lifecycle has slowed for certain groups.
Topic:
Women, Employment, Economic Growth, and Economic Mobility
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

8. Association between Caste and Class in India: Evolution of Caste-Class Dynamics during Economic Growth

Author:
Vaishali Kohli
Publication Date:
09-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University
Abstract:
Caste and class are two major markers of social and economic stratification in India. They play a crucial role in sustaining and strengthening the process of social exclusion. It has been often expected that the process of economic growth and modernization may weaken the congruence between caste and class structures and induce social and economic mobility, thereby bringing about a change in the socio-economic environment. In this paper, we focus on the celebrated period of high economic growth in India during the previous decade to study the evolution of caste-class dynamics, to analyze the pattern of association between caste and class positions, and to examine whether this association/congruence has weakened during this period. The analysis is based on four rounds of employment-unemployment surveys of the National Sample Survey Organization covering the period 1999-2012. We construct a matrix of caste and class positions of repeated cross-sections of individuals that shows whether different caste groups are over- or under-represented in different class positions and how these representations have changed over time. We then use a multinomial logistic regression framework to capture the role of caste in explaining the conditional probability of an individual to belong to a particular class position, after controlling for other critical explanatory variables. We further examine how the explanatory role of caste has changed over time. Additionally, we explore the role of education, a crucial channel for socioeconomic mobility, in explaining the class positions of individuals belonging to different caste groups over time. Finally, we examine the impact of high economic growth in determining the class position of an individual in general, as well as for different caste groups over time. The analysis shows that caste has continued to remain an important factor in explaining class locations of individuals during the period of high economic growth. Further, the caste-class associations have continued to persist across different categories of education over time. While there has been a partial weakening of certain associations during the period, particularly for the Other Backward Castes and in some parts of the rural sector, the overall picture is more of continuity than change, with further strengthening and reinforcement of caste-class congruence along several axes. This calls into question the 2 expectations about social mobility with economic growth as well as the nature of economic growth in India.
Topic:
Development, Economic Growth, Class, Caste, Social Exclusion, and Social Mobility
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

9. What did they say? Respondent identity, question framing and the measurement of employment

Author:
Rosa Abraham, Nishat Anjum, Rahul Lahoti, and Hema Swaminathan
Publication Date:
09-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University
Abstract:
In developing countries, a precise approach to measuring women’s employment remains elusive. Emerging evidence underscores the pivotal role of survey methodology, encompassing respondent selection and question framing, in shaping the assessment of women’s employment. Drawing from two labor market experiments in rural India, this study offers insights on the influence of survey design on the measurement of women’s employment. The first experiment contrasts self-reported women’s and men’s employment figures with proxy-reported data from spouses. Women’s self-reported workforce participation surpasses proxy-reported estimates by six percentage points, while men’s estimates exhibit negligible differences. There are significant differences in the type of employment activities reported by self and proxy for both women and men. These divergences emanate from asymmetric measurement errors, stemming from gender-based norm disparities between spouses, and divergent interpretations of employment. Additionally, information asymmetry between spouses concerning women’s marginal activities and disparities in spousal characteristics contribute to these self-proxy differences. The second experiment investigates if framing of questions and recall period has an impact on reporting of labor market outcomes. We find that employing multiple questions to capture weekly employment status yields a 10-percentage-point increase in reported women’s workforce participation, but men’s participation rate decreases by six percentage points. Furthermore, when a distinct employment query is directed at each day of the preceding week as opposed to a single query for the entire week, reported women’s workforce participation increases by seven percentage points, and men’s by four percentage points.
Topic:
Development, Employment, Survey, Methods, and Gender
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

10. Jobless growth and structural transformation: Some theoretical considerations and empirical evidence from India

Author:
Zico Dasgupta and Amit Basole
Publication Date:
09-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University
Abstract:
The decoupling of output growth and employment growth, known popularly as “jobless growth” has been a problem plaguing many countries. Using cross-country data, we show that India has underperformed significantly on job creation compared to the average developing country with lower than average employment elasticities at both the aggregate level and for the non-agricultural sector. Strikingly, we find a one-for-one relationship between output growth and productivity growth in India’s non-agricultural sector, i.e. a Kaldor-Verdoorn coefficient of one. Despite this joblessness of growth, the Indian economy has experienced some structural transformation with the share of the non-agricultural sector and the share of regular wage employment rising at the expense of agriculture and self-employment. We develop a theoretical model which clarifies the relative roles of labour demand and labour supply in determining the output-employment relationship. In this model, the Indian case of some structural transformation even with jobless growth emerges as one case among four possible cases (growth with or without jobs / structural change or no structural change). We conclude with some policy implications.
Topic:
Employment, Economic Growth, Gender, Structural Transformation, and Jobless Growth
Political Geography:
South Asia and India