Whenever I went missing as a child, my mother would come looking for me in the pata, Lalitabai Meshram said, laughing out loud. “My friends and I would play in the tangled vines for hours, making dolls of corn husk and hair, eating groundnuts, beans and waluk melon. Sometimes I would fall asleep there,” recalled Meshram, now 50-plus. Last year, after about four decades, she carved out a pata from...

Ever since Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama, which castigated India as a “soft state”, western observers, as well as many members of the Nehruvian wing of Macaulay’s children, have failed to understand the anarchical society which has existed in India for millennia. A recent review (Journal of Economic Literature, September 2009) by Lant Pritchett (a former World Bank official in Delhi) of Financial Times’ former India correspondent Edward Luce’s book In...

Faced with rising world hunger and “unacceptable” poverty, members of the Food and Agriculture Organisation Committee on World Food Security (CFS) have agreed on a wide-ranging reform, the FAO announced on Tuesday. The reform aims at making the CFS an “inclusive” international and intergovernmental platform dealing with food security and nutrition, and its being a central component in the evolving global partnership for agriculture, food security and nutrition. In addition...

Concerted efforts have been made to give a new lease of life to the Doha Round of WTO negotiations. The question before us is: what is the most relevant role which this revived round of trade talks can play? If we take an overview of the entire international trade scene and the changes that have taken place ever since the WTO was created (including the negotiations which preceded the WTO’s...

THE ongoing negotiations with the World Bank provide an opportunity to urban policymakers to reinvent the present form of JNNURM (called v1.0). Thus far JNNURM v1.0 has focused on upgrading macro-level dimensions of city’s environment, ignoring the social and economic diversity (e.g., mixed uses and building types) prevailing in urban areas. The top-down urban ‘renewal’ model underlying the present version of JNNURM is largely founded on the planning practices of...