Democracy, Development and Decentralisation in India: Continuing Debates

Economic reform in India has largely taken place at a time of assertive cultural nationalism and growing pressures for advancement and assertion from within India's subaltern communities. This book explores the mainsprings, contours and consequences of democratisation, decentralisation and development in India and offers new insights into its contemporary political economy. It considers how and why unequal patterns of economic growth have taken shape within the context of a democratic and decentralising political system, and how and why that system has impacted upon processes of economic development. The different articles address how competing claims have been negotiated; in what measure has a bias in favour of political decentralisation helped the government push ahead with an economic reform agenda; and who is being left behind in the race for income growth. The book makes some important theoretical contributions to the continuing debates on democracy and development in Indian context and balances the arguments with a good variety of empirical material.

The book will be of interest to scholars of development studies and policy makers as also to those in the field of area studies, South Asia studies, comparative polities, sociology and geography.

The book offers new insights into the political economy of contemporary India. It considers how and why unequal patterns of economic growth in India have taken shape within the context of a democratic and decentralising political system, and how and why that system has impacted upon processes of economic development. The articles address issues such as how competing claims have been negotiated; in what measure has a bias in favour of political decentralisation helped the government push ahead with an economic reform agenda; and who is being left behind in the race for income growth.

Chandan Sengupta is Professor of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, where he has been teaching and doing research since 1982. He visited the London School of Economics and Political Science from November 2007 to November 2008 under the LSE-TISS visiting fellowship programme. He has conducted 20 research projects and published many papers. He is the co-author, with P. N. Mukherji, of Indigencity and Universality in Social Sciences: A South Asian Response.
Stuart Corbridge is Head of the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science, having previously taught at the universities of Cambridge, Miami and Syracuse. He is author or co-author of six books and more than 70 academic papers. His most recent book, with Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava and Rene Veron, is Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India.