Economic & Political Weekly: Table of Content

EditorialsVol - XLIX No. 31, August 02, 2014  Juvenile Public Rage The law should not be changed to pander to mediatised public panics. Read more	Margin Speak Saffron Neo-liberalism Anand Teltumbde An aggressive drive towards neo-liberal economic reforms alongside consolidation of the Bharatiya Janata Party's political constituency with the spread of hegemonic Hindutva through sociocultural channels is on the cards. Read more
Commentary An Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove Draft Juvenile Justice Bill Dhvani Mehta Laudable amendments regarding adoption and the state of children's homes sit uncomfortably alongside an alarming proposal permitting juveniles to be tried by regular courts for serious offences in the proposed re-enactment of the Juvenile... Read more	Commentary Fatwas and Muslim Women Irfan Engineer The Supreme Court's ruling that clarifi es that though it is not unconstitutional to issue fatwas, they are merely opinions of the issuer and not binding on anyone must be welcomed. The Court has, however, taken a balanced view in not... Read more
Commentary Sex Ratio, Khaps and Marriage Reform Ravinder Kaur The move by the Satrol khap of Haryana to relax some restrictive marriage norms and induct women and youth into the khap is perhaps a response to demographic and market economy challenges. Patriarchal structures get challenged when material... Read more	Commentary Forward Guidance in Retreat K Subramanian One among the many ingredients of the verbal soup dished out by United States Federal Reserve to help the economy regain its health in the years after the 2008 crisis was FG (forward guidance), linked closely to QE (quantitative easing). But the... Read more
Commentary Which Way for Public Libraries in India? Chitralekha The public library has a significant role to play in the development of intellectual and political well-being of a democracy, but is poorly equipped to play a transformative role as it has been neglected by the state governments. Now that there... Read more	Commentary Sukumari Bhattacharji's World Kumkum Roy Sukumari Bhattacharji - Sanskritist, historian, writer, educationist - with a passionate commitment to social and political change, passed away on 24 May 2014 at the age of 92. Excerpts from an interview the author conducted with her. Read more
Budget 2014-15 / Special Issues Agriculture: Intentions and Actions Ramesh Chand, Raka Saxena The agriculture sector has grown rapidly in the past decade but this has been on the back of rising real prices and not productivity growth. Budget 2014 made a large number of announcements on new schemes and new policies to address the immediate... Read more	Budget 2014-15 / Special Issues New Macroeconomic Consensus Rules Budget 2014-15 Rohit A critique of the macroeconomic framework that underlies the fiscal consolidation approach of the Union Budget for 2014-15 . Read more
Budget 2014-15 / Special Issues Revenue Mobilisation Assumptions of Buoyancy J Dennis Rajakumar, Deepa Vaidya In recent years, fiscal consolidation has been led by contraction in government spending. In the Union Budget for 2014-15 revenue mobilisation has received a major thrust, as buoyancies of all major taxes are expected to go up. This article... Read more	Budget 2014-15 / Special Issues Cracks in Budgetary Policies towards the Social Sectors Subrat Das The union budget for 2014-15 offers few changes in terms of policy priorities from the United Progressive Alliance government's interim budget for 2014-15, and it fails to recognise the cracks in the country's budgetary policies towards... Read more
Budget 2014-15 / Special Issues Union Budget and the 'Digital Divide' Old Wine in New Bottle Vipul Mudgal The emphasis on use of digital technologies to bridge the "rural-urban gap" in the union budget is limited to high talk and minimal allocations. The need for a more comprehensive and peoples' participation-oriented rural action plan... Read more	Book Reviews Politics of Memory Reclaiming ‘Out-of-Date’ East Pakistan Rita Manchanda Partition's Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia by Ananya Jahanara Kabir (New Delhi: Women Unlimited) 2013; pp 216, Rs 400. Read more
Book Reviews The Challenge of Employment in Globalising India S Mahendra Dev India Labour and Employment Report 2014, principal author and editor, Alakh N Sharma (Institute for Human Development and Academic Foundation, New Delhi), 2014; pp 248, Rs 995. Read more	Perspectives Disappearance of the Study of 'Politics' Dhananjay Rai The eclipse of the discipline of political studies in India's new central universities exhibits a lack of disciplinary purpose. The purpose of the discipline of political studies is to inform us about a political community, while "applied... Read more
Special Articles Social Welfare and Household Consumption Expenditure in India - 2004-05 to 2011-12 Bhaskar Dutta, Manoj Panda This paper uses a modification of the well-known statistical concept of the Lorenz curve - the Generalised Lorenz curve - and its associated social welfare properties to measure changes in well-being of households in India during the last decade... Read more	Special Articles The Last Sahibs Governors in British India, March-August 1947 Rakesh Ankit Little has been written about the role of provincial governors in the closing period of British rule in India with all the emphasis being on the Viceroys. This article instead considers the sahibs in the provinces. When British India came to an... Read more
Special Articles Sheikh Abdullah and Land Reformsin Jammu and Kashmir Anirudh Kumar Prasad One of the reasons attributed to the poor agricultural situation in post-Independence India was its unequal land relationship. The Congress Party opted for land reforms as that would transform India into a progressive nation. As the 1949... Read more	Notes A Poet and a Landlord Swati Ganguly The Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Rabindranath Tagore in 1913 included a prize money of £8,000. It is commonly assumed that Tagore spent this entire sum on the asrama school in Santiniketan, and later for setting up his dream... Read more
Discussion Fresh Thinking Needed Mukul Sanwal The promise of inclusive and sustainable development can only be achieved if key policy decisions are rethought with clear priorities – on urbanisation and economic growth – with the transformations kept within ecological limits. A... Read more