As India enters its seventy-fifth year of independence, conventional policy is unlikely to combat the breadth of its economic challenges. Across a range of areas-human capital, technology, agriculture, finance, trade, public service delivery and more-new ideas must now be on the table. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only cost India many lives and livelihoods, it has also exposed major structural weaknesses in the economy. A huge farm and jobs crisis, rising and massive inequalities, tepid investment growth, and chronic banking sector challenges have plagued the economy, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has also exposed the limitations of the Indian state, which tries to control too much-and ends up stifling the economy and the inherent energies of its young population. Climate change is no longer a distant threat, while disruptive technology has huge implications for India's demographic dividend. In addition, the dangerous lurch towards majoritarianism will cast its shadow on India's pursuit of prosperity for all. Unshackling India examines the question: Can India use the next twenty-five years, when it will reach the hundredth year of independence, to restructure not only its economy but rejuvenate its democratic energy and unshackle its potential-to become a genuinely developed economy by 2047? The book argues that India can foster a prosperous and inclusive economy if it sets its mind to it, acknowledges the hard truths, and lays out the clear choices and new ideas India must adopt towards that end.

A remarkable, first-ever collection of 35 essays on India's future, by a diverse set of authors - activists, researchers, media practitioners, those who have influenced policies and those working at the grassroots. This book brings together scenarios of an India that is politically and socially egalitarian, radically democratic, economically sustainable and equitable, and socio-culturally diverse and harmonious. Alternative Futures: India Unshackled covers a wide range of issues, organized under four sections. It explores ecological futures including environmental governance, biodiversity conservation, water and energy. Next, it envisions political futures including those of democracy and power, law, ideology, and India's role in the globe. A number of essays then look at economic futures, including agriculture, pastoralism, industry, crafts, villages and cities, localization, markets, transportation and technology. Finally, it explores socio-cultural futures, encompassing languages, learning and education, knowledge, health, sexuality and gender, and marginalized sections like dalits, adivasis, and religious minorities. Introductory and concluding essays tie these diverse visions together. Most essays include both futuristic scenarios and present initiatives that demonstrate the possibility of such futures. At a time when India faces increasing polarization along parochial, physical and mental boundaries, these essays provide a breath of fresh air and hope in the grounded possibilities for an alternative, decentralized, eco-culturally centred future. The essays range from the dreamy-eyed to the hard-headed, from the provocative to the gently persuasive. This book would hold appeal for a wide range of readers - youth, academics, development professionals, policy makers, government officials, activists, people's movements, media persons, business persons - concerned about the current state of India and the world, and willing to engage critically in the collective search for a better future.

"A Glow of Patriotic Fire"--"Salutary Neglect" -- "Force Prevails Now Everywhere" -- "For Cutting Off Our Trade" -- "To The Shores of Tripoli" -- "The Reign of Witches" -- "Free Trade and Sailors Rights" -- "War Now! War Always!" -- "Remember the Raisin" -- "Purified As by Fire" -- "Father, Listen to Your Children" -- "You Shall Now Feel the Effects of War" -- "Destroy and Lay Waste" -- "Hard War" -- "So Proudly We Hail" -- "I Must Not Be Lost

This book charts the course of Kaushik Basu’s career over seven years, as he moved out of the cloisters of academe to the frenetic world of policymaking, first in India as Chief Economic Adviser to the Indian Government and after that as Chief Economist at the World Bank in Washington. The Indian years were a period of high inflation, growth challenges (as the global financial crisis arrived in India), and also a remarkable growth recovery story, with India moving past China’s GDP growth rate. There were corruption scandals breaking, causing widespread street protests, a lot of late-night decision-making, which one knew would rock the stock market the next day, and getting to know politicians who were outstanding as statesmen in the midst of all this, and also many who were not. The World Bank years weren’t that close to actual policymaking, but nevertheless breath-taking in their scope. They ranged from interacting with policymakers in tiny remote countries like Samoa to gigantic nations with comparable heft, such as China. It entailed sitting down with leading researchers to compute and announce global numbers on extreme poverty and rankings on how easy it is to do business in different countries (fully aware that there would be calls from irate finance ministers as soon as these were published). And there was the handling of politics within the World Bank, which could actually be as enjoyable as any global economic problem! This book is a revised version of the diary that Kaushik Basu kept for seven years. Revised because he often wrote the diary in a hurry at the day’s or even week’s end. He has now inserted some reflections in retrospect, without altering any descriptions of what actually happened.

Although South Asian cookery and gastronomy has transformed contemporary urban foodscape all over the world, social scientists have paid scant attention to this phenomenon. Curried Cultures–a wide-ranging collection of essays–explores the relationship between globalization and South Asia through food, covering the cuisine of the colonial period to the contemporary era, investigating its material and symbolic meanings. Curried Cultures challenges disciplinary boundaries in considering South Asian gastronomy by assuming a proximity to dishes and diets that is often missing when food is a lens to investigate other topics. The book’s established scholarly contributors examine food to comment on a range of cultural activities as they argue that the practice of cooking and eating matter as an important way of knowing the world and acting on it.

As the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government completes its current term ahead of the General Elections 2019, it is time to evaluate its performance, specifically in terms of its management of the economy. This book is a critical assessment of five years of the brand of economics Prime Minister Narendra Modi has championed, often referred to as 'Modinomics'. Brought into power with the biggest political mandate in almost three decades, did the NDA government succeed in gainfully transforming India's economic trajectory or did it squander a once-in-a-generation opportunity? The book conjectures it is the latter, and analyses why the Modi government's stewardship of the economy is a 'great disappointment'.