As author of the hugely influential The Economic History of India 1857-1947, Tirthankar Roy has established himself as the leading contemporary economic historian of India. Here, Roy turns his attention to labour and livelihood and the nature of economic change in the Subcontinent. This book covers: economic history of modern India rural labour labour-intensive industrialization women and industrialization. Challenging the prevailing wisdom on Indian economic growth - that it is bound up with Marxian, postcolonial class analysis - Roy formulates a new view. Commercialization, surplus labour and uncertainty are seen as equally important and the end result reconciles the increasingly opposed view of economists and historians.

Much about India's economy and aid flows has changed in the last two decades. India's growth rate has quickened since economic liberalisation, the poverty head count has fallen and the volume and composition of its aid have changed as new issues of climate change and the environment have emerged.. Yet Does Aid Work in India?, first published in 1990, remains of great interest as a study of aid effectiveness in India's pre-liberalisation era. It identifies those sectors where aid-funded interventions succeeded, and where they failed. It explains how India avoided problems of aid dependence, and managed the political tensions that are associated with aid policy dialogue. More generally, it contains a useful commentary on and criticism of donors' aid evaluation procedures at that time and it highlights donor efforts in the difficult area of institution building. Despite the passage of time, many of the insights from India's earlier experience remain highly relevant to key issues of development assistance today.