With six essays exploring different aspects of economic growth, poverty, inequality and social security, this book offers a critical perspective on India's development experience since independence. Incisive and empirically rich, the book opens up new vistas in development discourse and informs current policy debates.

With six essays exploring different aspects of economic growth, poverty, inequality and social security, this book offers a critical perspective on India's development experience since independence. Incisive and empirically rich, the book opens up new vistas in development discourse and informs current policy debates.

India initiated liberal economic reforms in 1991 to transform a slow-growing, state-led economy into an open, export-oriented industrialising economy. Though economic growth has accelerated, industrialisation has suffered from the manufacturing sector's share and labour intensive sectors failing to improve in India's exports. The government launched the Make in India initiative in 2015 aimed at raising the manufacturing sector's share in GDP to 25 percent, and to create an additional 100 million jobs by 2022. Though official estimates show an optimistic image of small scale industries, they do not explain why India failed to boost industrial production as expected of the reforms. Why did they fail to keep the domestic market, let alone expand exports? What would it take to meet the ambitious policy goals of the initiative? This book attempts to address these questions. It looks at a series of case studies of the small industry to obtain an in-depth understanding of specific industries and locations to draw meaningful conclusions.

The need to understand regional variation in politics and political economy, and how these have contributed to different developmental outcomes across various parts of India, remains pressing. It was suggested in the early 1960s that in India the central government was largely under the control of a national capitalist class, while the states were dominated by landed interests. Does such a formulation hold ground today? With increasing political mobilization among lower classes and castes and the diffusion of economic power to the state level after the reforms, how can variation in regional development be characterized? This volume aims to answer these questions by studying aspects of macro-economy, land, labour and employment from a variety of analytical and disciplinary perspectives. It offers rich analyses of economic growth viewed through the lenses of caste, regional politics and public investment, while also looking at long-term trends in employment and wages in the public sector, and the consequences of legal and policy reform.