India's Political Administrators is a revised and updated edition of the now classic political study of India's administrators before and after independence. This highly original study shows administrative continuities across 1947 and explains the consequences of these continuities for the modern Indian state. The focus is primarily on the Indian Civil Service and its successor, the Indian Administrative Service, and the book draws on the autobiographical reminiscences of the men and women who served in them, as well as on interview material and unpublished papers. The book also makes a significant contribution to current research on political aspects of the work of elite administrators. More fundamentally, it concentrates on a neglected area of theorizing about the state by explaining how state forms are reproduced through time despite changes in the political environment.

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.

The first thorough study of the co-existence of crime and democratic processes in Indian politics In India, the world's largest democracy, the symbiotic relationship between crime and politics raises complex questions. For instance, how can free and fair democratic processes exist alongside rampant criminality? Why do political parties recruit candidates with reputations for wrongdoing? Why are one-third of state and national legislators elected--and often re-elected--in spite of criminal charges pending against them? In this eye-opening study, political scientist Milan Vaishnav mines a rich array of sources, including fieldwork on political campaigns and interviews with candidates, party workers, and voters, large surveys, and an original database on politicians' backgrounds to offer the first comprehensive study of an issue that has implications for the study of democracy both within and beyond India's borders.

This volume examines the distinct structural characteristics of Indian politics and unearths significant sociopolitical and economic processes which are critical to the political articulation of governance in the country. It reflects on the foundational values of Indian polity, the emergence of the nation post-colonialism, the structural fluidity of federalism in India, and the changing nature of the planning process in the country. The book also studies the electoral processes, social movements, party system, local and state governance. Apart from analyzing corruption and public grievance systems, the volume also probes into significant issues in Indian politics. This book will be useful to the students, researchers and faculty working in the field of political science, public administration, political sociology, political economy and post-colonial contemporary Indian politics in particular. It will also be an invaluable and interesting reading for those interested in South Asian studies.

The political parties are a link between the citizens and the government and give meaning to the electoral process in a democracy. Since independence, political parties in India have been playing an important role in sustaining India’s democracy. A question may, however, be asked ‘how have they fared compared to their counterparts in other democracies?’ A comparison is perhaps possible based on the respective visions of the political parties as reflected in their election manifestoes. The present book examines the vision of political parties with respect to ‘administrative reforms’. Significantly, the two Administrative Reforms Commissions in the past identified a host of areas needing reforms. While a good many of their recommendations have been implemented, a larger number of them have remained unimplemented. ‘Lack of political will’ has often been held responsible for their non-implementation. The book attempts to draw attention to issues relating to administrative reforms at the level of the Central Government, the State Government and the Local Bodies.

Contributed articles.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.