This paper presents a new set of integrated poverty and inequality estimates for India and Indian states for 1987-88, 1993-94 and 1999-2000. The poverty estimates are broadly consistent with independent evidence on per-capita expenditure, state domestic product and real agricultural wages. They show that poverty decline in the 1990s proceeded more or less in line with earlier trends. Regional disparities increased in the 1990s, with the southern and western regions doing much better than the northern and eastern regions. Economic inequality also increased within states, especially within urban areas, and between urban and rural areas. We briefly examine other development indicators, relating for instance to health and education. Most indicators have continued to improve in the nineties, but social progress has followed very diverse patterns, ranging from accelerated progress in some fields to slowdown and even regression in others. We find no support for sweeping claims that the nineties have been a period of "unprecedented improvement" or "widespread impoverishment".

Poverty and Inequality in India: A Re-Examination

Immigration is often viewed as a proximate cause of the rising wage gap between highand
low-skilled workers. Nevertheless, there is controversy over the appropriate
theoretical and empirical framework for measuring the presumed effect, and over the
precise magnitudes involved. This paper offers an overview and synthesis of existing
knowledge on the relationship between immigration and inequality, focusing on evidence
from cross-city comparisons in the U.S. While some researchers have claimed that a
cross-city research design is inherently flawed, I argue that the evidence from cross-city
comparisons is remarkably consistent with recent findings based on aggregate time
series data. In particular, cross-city and aggregate time series comparisons provide
support for three key conclusions: (1) workers with below high school education are
perfect substitutes for those with a high school education; (2) “high school equivalent”
and “college equivalent” workers are imperfect substitutes, with an elasticity of
substitution on the order of 2; (3) within education groups, immigrants and natives are
imperfect substitutes. Together these results imply that the average impacts of recent
immigrant inflows on the relative wages of U.S. natives are small. The effects on overall
wage inequality (including natives and immigrants) are larger, reflecting the
concentration of immigrants in the tails of the skill distribution and higher residual
inequality among immigrants than natives. Even so, immigration accounts for a small
share (5%) of the increase in U.S. wage inequality between 1980 and 2000.

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Immigration and Inequality

Part I. The State and the Poor: 1. Seeing the state 2. Technologies of rule and the war on poverty Part II. The Everyday State and Society: 3. Meeting the state 4. Participation 5. Governance 6. Political society Part III. The Poor and the State: 7. Protesting the state 8. Postcolonialism, development studies and spaces of empowerment 9. Postscript: development ethics and the ethics of critique.

Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India

Using recent cross-sectional data of rural children aged from 8 to 18 in Hunan Province of China, this article examines psychological, behavioral, and educational outcomes and the psychosocial contexts of these outcomes among children left behind by one or both of their rural-to-urban migrant parents compared to those living in nonmigrant families. The results showed that left-behind children were disadvantaged in health behavior and school engagement but not in perceived satisfaction. The child’s psychosocial environment, captured by family socioeconomic status, socializing processes, peer and school support, and psychological traits, were associated with, to varying extent, child developmental outcomes in rural China. These influences largely remain constant for the sampled children regardless of their parents’ migrant status.

Child Development in Rural China: Children Left behind by Their Migrant Parents and Children of Nonmigrant Families.

Seeing the State: List of boxes, figures and tables

Over 500,000 people are regularly engaged in seasonal migration for rice work into southern West Bengal. This paper analyses social processes at work in the interactions between employers and workers, and the welfare/illfare outcomes. Group identities based on religion and ethnicity are strengthened through the experience of migration and deployed by some migrants to make this form of employment less degrading. In West Bengal seasonal migration can involve practical welfare gains. Importantly, an informal wage floor has been put into place and managed by the peasant union allied to the largest party in the Left Front regime. However, the costs and risks of migration remain high.

Seasonal Migration and Welfare/Illfare in Eastern India: A Social Analysis

Seasonal Migration, Social Change and Migrants? Rights: Lessons from West Bengal

This article tells of changing social and spatial identities in the countryside of con temporary West Bengal. It draws on a study of interactions between those seeking wage work in agriculture and the people trying to recruit them. We find a continuing and nested process of both self-identification and categorisation. Unconscious as well as conscious ethnic affinities are consolidated and changed. At the same time, identities are used instrumentally by workers to make the outcome of negotiations less demeaning, and by employers to bargain more effectivelyfor the workforce they need. The context is one of the emergence of capitalist production relations in agriculture, presided over by a coalition government led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The newly pros perous agriculture has been a source of wealth for capitalist employers, reinforcing constructions of difference in relation to the migrant workers they employ. At the same time, many employers are attracted by the prospects of urban,jobs and life-styles and invest in their children's education. Migrant workers show a similar ambivalence, being attracted by the potential earnings and consumption possibilities arising out of being employed in the West Bengal 'rice bowl', and simultaneously repelled by the dangers they associate with the place.

Seasonal migration, employer-worker interactions, and shifting ethnic identities in contemporary West Bengal.

Research by the University of East Anglia studies the dangers migrant workers face. It was noted that over 500000 people migrate during the main monsoonal rice harvest to work in Barddhaman District at the center of West Bengals rice bowl. Despite having more choice than other migrant manual workers recruited by middlemen they are however not usually unionized and are often unprotected by legislation against travel and workplace risks. Overall the study points out that migrants clearly face a number of dangers on their journeys and at the workplace. The study concludes with several suggestions regarding protection of migrant workers and for longer term development policies.

Seasonal migration social change and migrants rights.

Secular Sectarianism: Limits of Subaltern Politics. Edited by Ajay Gudavarthy (New Delhi: SAGE, 2019). viii + 280 pp, ₹1095. ISBN: 978-93-532-8677-4.

Kumar Rana

Papers

Seasonal Migration and Welfare/Illfare in Eastern India: A Social Analysis

Seasonal Migration, Social Change and Migrants? Rights: Lessons from West Bengal

Seasonal migration, employer-worker interactions, and shifting ethnic identities in contemporary West Bengal.

Seasonal migration social change and migrants rights.

Book review: Secular Sectarianism: Limits of Subaltern Politics