This book examines the politics behind, and the socio-economic and ecological repercussions of, the making of a new township, variously called New Town, Megacity or Jyoti Basu Nagar, in Rajarhat near Kolkata. Conceived by the West Bengal state government in the mid-1990s, in pandering to the vision of urban planners of creating a hi-tech town beyond an unruly, crowded Kolkata, and feeding the hunger of realtors and developers, the city is built on the foundations of coercive, even violent, land acquisition, state largesse and corruption — and at the cost of erasing a self-sufficient subsistence economy and despoiling a fragile environment. Yet, after its completion and departure of construction labour, the new town appears as a necropolis, a ghost city, that belies its promised image of an urban utopia, even as the displaced locals lead a precarious, mobile existence as ‘transit labour’, engaged in odd and informal jobs. Written on the basis of intensive fieldwork, government documents, court records, and chronicles of public protests, this book broadly analyses the politics and economics of urbanisation in the age of post-colonial capitalism, particularly the paradoxical combination of neoliberal and primitive modes of capital accumulation upon which the global emergence of ‘new towns’ is based. Departing from the dominant styles of urban studies that focus on cultural or spatial analysis of cities, the authors show the links between changes in space, technology, political economy, class composition, and forms of urban politics which give concrete shape to a city. It will immensely interest those in sociology, political science, economics, development studies, urban studies, policy and governance studies, and history.

In 2020, for the first time in history, the world's debt as a percentage of its gross domestic product exceeded 100%. Although it has come down slightly since then, there are concerns about where the next debt crisis will happen, given that Pakistan and Sri Lanka have already found themselves in debt crises. India's overall fiscal health and macro-economic conditions remain stable, but the same may not be completely true when the discussion shifts to India's subnational entities. In Debt Sustainability of Subnational Governments in India: Lessons from International Debt Crises, Dwivedi attempts to answer this question by analysing the debt sustainability of the states in the context of many emerging issues and challenges to their fiscal health with the aim of providing usable and practical recommendations that can ensure the fiscal health of the subnational governments in India and across the world. Focusing on the state or provincial governments, Dwivedi addresses the debt that the government undertakes to fund its programmes and examines whether such governments are indulging in taking excessive debt. Some of the aspects covered in the book include international experiences with excessive borrowings or debt creation and the learnings from these experiences, trends of state government debt (subnational debt), emerging issues that pose challenges to state finances, and recommendations to control debt from spiralling out of control.