Middle India and Rural-Urban Development explores the socio-economic conditions of an ‘India’ that falls between the cracks of macro-economic analysis, sectoral research and micro-level ethnography. Its focus, the ‘middle India’ of small towns, is relatively unknown in scholarly terms for good reason: it requires sustained and difficult field research. But it is where most Indians either live or constantly visit in order to buy and sell, arrange marriages and plot politics. Anyone who wants to understand India therefore needs to understand non-metropolitan, provincial, small-town India and its economic life. This book meets this need. From 1973 to the present, Barbara Harriss-White has watched India’s development through the lens of an ordinary town in northern Tamil Nadu, Arni. This book provides a pluralist, multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspective on Arni and its rural hinterland. It grounds general economic processes in the social specificities of a given place and region. In the process, continuity is juxtaposed with abrupt change. A strong feature of the book is its analysis of how government policies that fail to take into account the realities of small town life in India have unintended and often perverse consequences. In this unique book, Harriss-White brings together ten essays written by herself and her research team on Arni and its surrounding rural areas. They track the changing nature of local business and the workforce; their urban-rural relations, their regulation through civil society organizations and social practices, their relations to the state and to India’s accelerating and dynamic growth. That most people live outside the metropolises holds for many other developing countries and makes this book, and the ideas and methods that frame it, highly relevant to a global development audience.

Three billion people live in rural areas in developing countries. Conditions for them are worse than for their urban counterparts when measured by almost any development indicator, from extreme poverty, to child mortality and access to electricity and sanitation.

Todays socio-economic scenario is highly volatile and risky. To sustain the growth and development is a big challenge for various national economic entities. After liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, most of these entities including national and multinational firms targeted the urban population for growth. It has been more than twenty-five years, and these urban markets are showing signs of maturation and saturation. This resulted in agencies and organisations looking for new avenues in order to sustain themselves. In such a scenario, Indias rural markets have emerged as a new hope for them. The hinterlands in India consist of more than 650,000 villages, which represent approximately 850 million consumers. This number is roughly equal to 70% of the total population. These rural consumers contribute to approximately half of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Since 2000, Indias rural sector showed a tremendous growth in its per-capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as compared to its urban counterpart (6.2% CAGR versus 4.7%). By the end of 2018, rural GDP is estimated to reach US$ 20 billion and touch US$ 100 billion by 2025. According to McKinsey Global Institute, the annual real income per household in rural India would rise to 3.6% by 2025 from the 2.8% over the last 20 years. Normally, it is assumed that urban consumers have more disposable income and their spending pattern is different from that of rural consumers. But the last decade has witnessed a change in this trend, with rural consumers exhibiting similar consumption patterns to that of their urban counterparts. This change is the result of various government initiatives such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act (MGNRA), Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Youjna and the National Social Assistance Program that have increased the purchasing power of rural India. This has led to higher spending by rural consumers (US $69 billion between 2009 and 2012), and this is significantly more than the US $55 billion spent by urban consumers. Owing to a favourable changing consumption trend as well as the potential size of the market, rural India provides a large and attractive opportunity for companies. The rural market is highly vibrant in nature, and the business organisations are performing both as the carrier and bearer of the results of this change, which is happening at an accelerating pace. In the initial years, rural consumers were on the receiving end, and now they are gradually getting into position to dictate the terms. A significant rural market share can be achieved by focusing on execution excellence by implementing novel strategies to serve rural consumers, and it must be drawn on a deep understanding of consumers cultures and needs. Research related to rural development in India is almost non-existent, and this book provides a window into the challenges that are faced in rural India. This book presents a window into the need for education in this subject at the same.

This book presents commuting as a new paradigm in mobility studies in the context of global south. It delves into suburban train commuting in Eastern India. The book interprets commuting not only as a means to attend work but also as a process producing kinetic event-space infused with different mobile practices, which is not determined by their locational fixity, rather can be cognized. It analyses the role of suburban train commuting in the metropolitan expansion of Kolkata, and the transformation of rural space into urban. The significant contribution of the book lies in explaining commuters’ experiencescape and the production of spatial fluidity in time capsule through commuting. It also explores the subjective reality of gendered commuting. The book uses a trans-disciplinary research design, blending quantitative and ethnographic research methods. The area selected for the empirical research is the Howrah-Bardhaman Main Railway Line (108 km), the first suburban railway line in Eastern India. Commuters originating from three adjacent districts of Purba Bardhaman, Hooghly and Howrah took part in this research. Besides the commuters, non-commuting passengers and hawkers in the train were also interviewed to understand the diverse perceptions of the process of commuting. This book may be considered as a reference book for mobility studies, transport studies, urban geography and regional planning.

This volume proposes an alternative development paradigm to the existing capitalist extant one, and studies how it is distinctly different from the older system. Rooted in the principles of solidarity between humans, as well as between humans and nature, this alternative paradigm replaces the methodological individualism of capitalism by ‘reciprocal altruism’, a new logic of capital, to give pace and direction to the development process. The essays in this volume highlight instances of various forms of solidarity that have emerged in the contemporary world—such as resistance movements of informal workers, the formation of an autonomous cooperative of self-employed waste pickers in India, called SWaCH, and Brazil and Cuba’s experiments with Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE)—to achieve long sustaining cohesive development. They also provide recommendations as to how the State can mold its development process to the benefit of marginalized communities, especially in India and Bangladesh. Featuring insights from leading experts in the field, Theorizing Cohesive Development will be an indispensable read for students and researchers of development studies, economics, political economy, political science and sociology, minority studies and Asian studies.

This edited book brings together in one place new studies of rural–urban interactions and their implications for regional growth and development in different regions within Asia. Specifically, the individual chapters in the book shed light on the different kinds of rural–urban interactions that we witness in Asian regions, particularly those that are based on migration, poverty, inequality, education, economic dependence, and the flow of goods and services. The book departs from the existing literature in three ways. First, it explicitly recognizes that different kinds of rural–urban interactions have dissimilar impacts on the lives and hence on the welfare of the residents of rural and urban regions. Second, the book emphasizes the varied spatial and temporal dimensions of the interactions and the ways in which these dimensions influence rural and urban societies. Third, this book demonstrates the ways in which an understanding of the preceding two points contributes to our knowledge about economic growth and development. Because Asia is the fastest-growing and most dynamic continent in the world today, the research delineated in the individual chapters of the book provides practical guidance concerning two salient questions. First, how do we effectively address the economic development challenges stemming from the interactions between alternate rural and urban regions within Asia? Second, how do we ensure that the policies we design to address these challenges give rise to broad-based economic growth and development that is sustainable?

​This volume decentres the view of urbanisation in India from large agglomerations towards smaller urban settlements. It presents the outcomes of original research conducted over three years on subaltern processes of urbanization. The volume is organised in four sections. A first one deals with urbanisation dynamics and systems of cities with chapters on the new census towns, demographic and economic trajectories of cities and employment transformation. The interrelations of land transformation, social and cultural changes form the topic of the “land, society, belonging” section based on ethnographic work in various parts of India (Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu). A third section focuses on public policies, governance and urban services with a set of macro-analysis based papers and specific case studies. Understanding the nature of production and innovation in non-metropolitan contexts closes this volume. Finally, though focused on India, this research raises larger questions with regard to the study of urbanisation and development worldwide.