The Changing Identity of Rural India

The book explores the pattern of rural development in contemporary India in a multidisciplinary and historical perspective.

The book explores the pattern of rural development in contemporary India in a multidisciplinary and historical perspective. The essays overcome the limits of disciplinary approaches to provide a comprehensive analysis of the processes of change and growth at work in the Indian countryside and to review the social and cultural dynamics that have led to the contemporary situation. Providing an analysis of the economic, political and social changes experienced in rural India, they examine the interactions between actors and institutions at different levels. Some contributions focus on the impact of state policies on rural development and on the rationale of capitalistic expansion in the Indian countryside, while others analyse how the changes are promoted, adopted and resisted at the local level.

The general issue raised in the book refers to the assessment of the nature and working of contemporary Indian rural economy. In order to analyse the complexity of the rural economy and the forms it takes in different Indian contexts, this issue has been deconstructed considering, in turn, the process of rural change, the impact of rural growth on working and living conditions, and finally the categories of the inhabitants of rural areas and the construction of their identities in colonial and post-colonial rural India.

INTRODUCTION
Capital and Labour Transformations in Shaping Rural Development in India
Elisabetta Basile and Ishita Mukhopadhyay
PART 1: INDIAN RURAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Identifying Livelihoods in Rural India
Ishita Mukhopadhyay
The Institutional Embeddedness of Indian Rural Capitalism
Elisabetta Basile
PART 2: INEQUALITY IN RURAL INDIA
Social Capital and Poverty Reduction Strategies: The Case of Rural India
Claudio Cecchi, Luca Molinas and Fabio Sabatini
An Overview of Indian Microfinance
Shirsendu Mukherjee and Sukanta Bhattacharya
Income-based Estimates vs Consumption-based Estimates of Poverty: Evidence from Rural Tamil Nadu after
Liberalization
Marco Cavalcante
Occupational Diversification of the Rural Workers: Some Results from Field Surveys in West Bengal
Sankar K Bhaumik
Literacy and Externalities in Human Development
Rabindranath Mukhopadhyay and Sudeshna Ghosh
PART 3: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND IDENTITIES
The Social Context of Politics in Rural West Bengal (1947–92)
Mario Prayer
Agrarian Expansion under Colonial Rule and its Impact on a Tribal Economy
Sanjukta Das Gupta
Acting on Institutions to Preserve Agricultural Biodiversity: The Syngenta Controversy in Chhattisgarh
Christine Lutringer
The Conflicting Opinions of the Colonial Bureaucracy over the Paraiyans Right over `Waste’ in late 19th
Century Tamil Nadu
Raj Sekhar Basu
Appendix 1: Maps of India
India: Percentage Decadal Growth
India: Population Density
Appendix 2: Socio-Economic Indicators of Rural India 319

Elisabetta Basile is Professor of Development Studies at the University of Rome `La Sapienza’.
Ishita Mukhopadhyay is a faculty in Department of Economics, University of Calcutta. She specializes in Economic methodology, Labour economics, Gender and development economics.