Over the last twenty years, India has enacted legislation to turn development goals such as food security, primary education, and employment into legal rights for its citizens. But enacting laws is different from implementing them. A Human Rights Based Approach to Development in India examines a diverse range of human development issues over a period of rapid economic growth in India. Demonstrating why institutional and economic development are synonymous, this volume details the many obstacles hindering development. The contributors ultimately ask whether India’s approach to development is working and whether its right to develop is at odds with its international commitments.

In 2003, the United Nations adopted a common rights-based approach to development in their efforts to promote an international standard of human rights throughout the world. The approach emphasizes economic, social, and cultural rights, but plays down the role of civil and political rights in development. Intergovernmental and non-governmental agencies operate only at the invitation and sufferance of their hosts, and states retain full sovereignty and control over their territory; and the direct promotion of civil and political rights by foreign organizations has seemed beyond the ability of multilateral development agencies. But as Development and Human Rights shows, UN agencies have begun to take on a remarkable set of development priorities that, while carefully circumscribed and defined, constitute greater involvement in a state's internal affairs than anyone would have considered in the past. In this book, Joel E. Oestreich presents the first full-length study of how international agencies evaluate the rights situation in a single country, and the first study to look at both the good and the bad in a rights-based approach. It looks particularly at the human rights challenges faced in India, considering the work of five UN agencies: UNICEF, the UN Development Programme, the World Bank, the UN Fund for Population Activities, and UN Women. Over the course of the book, Oestreich summarizes how the UN navigates this difficult political terrain, and how effectively these policies are being implemented. Development and Human Rights ultimately considers how rights-based approaches fit in the traditional discourse on human rights, and the ability of these agencies to initiate meaningful change on state behavior in the rights arena.

The Right to Development (RTD), a concept that emerged in the 1970s, is one of the most debated and contentious issues in international relations. RTD builds on the rights based approach to development, seeking to integrate the norms and principles of human rights with policies and plans to promote development. Despite its importance for the world’s poor and dispossessed, a great deal of definitional confusion still surrounds the concept./-//-/This primer introduces the concept of RTD as well as discusses its practical application in the Indian setting. It is divided accordingly into two sections, the first of which traces the origins and the evolution of the idea of RTD. This section identifies the defining parameters and content of RTD and focuses especially on the three rights—the rights to food, education and health—that have been identified as a ‘good starting point’ for the implementation of RTD. The last chapter in this section underscores the importance of women’s rights in order to emphasise the need to focus on safeguarding and promoting the human rights of vulnerable groups./-//-/Part II covers substantially the Indian situation relating to RTD. The first chapter in this section provides an overview of the legal and institutional mechanism in India for the protection of human rights in general and women’s rights in particular. The next chapter examines the implementation of the rights to food, health and education. The last chapter in this section details the functioning of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) —which has emerged in recent years as an important mechanism for securing social justice—and the challenges and limitations of this mechanism.

This book is devoted to the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development. It contains a collection of analytical studies of various aspects of the right to development, which include the rule of law and good governance, aid, trade, debt, technology transfer, intellectual property, access to medicines and climate change in the context of an enabling environment at the local, regional and international levels. It also explores the issues of poverty, women and indigenous peoples within the theme of social justice and equity. The book considers the strides that have been made over the years in measuring progress in implementing the right to development and possible ways forward to make the right to development a reality for all in an increasingly fragile, interdependent and ever-changing world.

Outlines a human rights-based approach to carbon finance, a framework for mainstreaming human rights into carbon project implementation.

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