Occasional  Paper 1  (July 2004) : 

Keynes, Kaldor and  Development Economics by Professor  Amiya Kumar Bagchi      amiya@idsk.org

Abstract

Development economics grew up as a stream fed by several different tributaries. The writings of nationalist policy-makers in colonial countries and the Soviet plan models are two of those tributaries. John Maynard Keynes and Nicholas Kaldor are often treated as economists who have nothing to teach about the problems bedevilling the contemporary global economy. However, their work not only illuminated the issues of turbulence of the capitalist economy but that work also left a conceptual framework for formulating policies for stabilization and growth both at the global and at the national level. In particular, their work shed a lurid light on the normal malfunctioning of unregulated stock markets and can be used to show the falsity of the claim that deregulating financial markets could increase the prosperity of nations. Their writings also demonstrated the importance of stabilizing the commodity markets and the incomes of primary producers for allowing the global economy to grow on a sustained basis. The deliberate amnesia imposed on new generations of economists by policy-makers of the neo-/iberal persuasion can be enormously harmful for their training.

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   Occasional  Paper 2  (July 2004) :

Epar Ganga Opar Ganga - A creative statement on displacement and violence  by Dr.Subhoranjan Dasgupta                                                                                                                                  subhoranjan@idsk.org

Abstract

This paper is divided into two parts. Tn the first, the importance of Jyotirmoyee Devi's novel on the Partition of India, Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (1967 and 1991), is explained in the broader context of the Literature of Partition, a genre whose focus has been on the related themes of dislocation and violence. The corrective accent of this literature is emphasized by drawing parallels with the Literature of Holocaust. In the second part, the remarkable novel Epar Ganga Opar Ganga is analysed to demonstrate how the subject of dislocation and violence has been explored with insight and sensitivity. What links the two parts is the theoretical conviction that the Literature of Exile and Rupture is not only a record of nightmare and agony but also a depiction of the indomitable struggle of the victims who often emerge triumphant after the dark night of trauma. In fact, it narrates the 'human' history of Partition and strives
to fill the gaps created by the conventional nationalist historiography of our freedom movement. The conclusion highlights the relevance of such creative literature in a milieu which has still to overcome the mindset of Partition.

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  Occasional  Paper 3  (July 2004) :

Samkhya and Vyanjana     Understanding Underdevelopment  by Professor  Prasanta Ray    prasanta@idsk.org

Abstract

Understanding of underdevelopment is severely constrained by an excessive commitment to quantitative approach on the part of bureaucrats, consultant social scientists and politicians. Samkhya's hegemony forecloses an in-depth understanding of human sufferance due to underdevelopment. Those who devise development plans must grasp vyanjana of sufferance. Qualitative approach in Sociology can sensitize policy planners about the ways to reach and understand such vyanjana.

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cheap cigarettes   Occasional  Paper 4  (July 2004) :

Gender , History and The Recovery of  Knowledge with Information and  Communication Technologies :  Reconfiguring the  future   of our past   by  Dr. Barnita Bagchi    barnita@idsk.org

Abstract

This paper is written from the perspective of a feminist humanities academic and analyses ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) may be used to recover women's history and women's writing, as well as to further activist feminist initiatives in realms such as basic education, while refusing to succumb to currently dominant neoliberal dispensations that sees ICTs in masculinist, instrurryental, and technocratic terms. It moves from the late 18th century in Britain, looking at the ways in which a radical writer like Mary Wollstonecraft adeptly used the communication technologies available in print in her time to further women's rights and women's education, to 20th-century Bengali writers such as Jyotirmoyee Devi and Rokeya Hossain, who also wrote powerfully on women's rights and women's education. While some of Wollstonecraft's works have been successfully digitised, those of the Bengali writers, and many more such Indian women writers, need to be digitised. However, such potential large-scale humanities and feminist projects are damaged by paucity of public funding, operating in line with a utilitarian and neo-liberal ideology. The paper argues that the Schools of Women's Studies in India, bridging activism and knowledge, and civil society organizations such as Vacha in Mumbai, have successfully shown how feminist knowledge recovery and activism c1amouring for continued public commitment to such activities can go hand in hand. Finally, it argues that while women have historically evolved an edge (valuable in the current global knowledge-economy) in developing flexible, multitasking capabilities, this does not mean that feminist intellectuals have no option but to become complicit with neo-liberal ideologies which seek to make flexibility and multitasking part and parcel of an economy that both manipulates and marginalizes women and the humanities.

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    Occasional  Paper 5  (October 2004) :

Kerala's Changing Development Narratives   by Professor Achin Chakraborty achin@idsk.org

Abstract

The popular development narrative for Kerala suggests that the Kerala experience throws up relevant issues that are expected to inform policy makers elsewhere in their endeavour to achieve human development goals within the constraints set by modest economic expansion. The positive tone of this narrative got somewhat subdued in the nineties by the growing literature on the problem of 'sustainability'  and 'crisis' potential of the so-called Kerala model. The crisis narrative now seems to be giving way to an emerging narrative of economic growth that might have indirect links with the earlier achievements in the spheres of education and health . In this paper, an attempt has been made to present Kerala's recent development experience in terms of several identifiable narratives, each one of which may have complex connections with ' facts'  .          

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  Occasional  Paper 6  (March 2005) :

The Development Centrifuge : A Retrospect in Search of a Theory and a Centre   by Professor Pinaki Chakraborti                                                                                                                                  pinaki@idsk.org               

                        
Abstract

This paper argues that the present discourse on development has been playing down the relevance of central plans and development economics. It intends to show that what is important is finding the right combination of planning at the central and the distant levels, which can be shown to exist formally, in respect of development activities. We have first argued that because of the presence of power asymmetries, deliberate decentralisation of development till the current endeavour, often remained ineffective. This factor rendered the present international approach, mainly through the leadership of the World Bank, superficial and somewhat centralised from outside, eventually connected in a manner to the power asymmetries prevailing in the present world economy. We have traversed through the experiences and the problems of collective choice as explored in the concept of decentralised development to derive the insight that delivery of development involves both publicness and privateness embodied in the associated goods, activities and services. Taking this as a point of departure, in the next step we have tried to highlight our construction of a theoretical model, to show that working out an optimal combination of central and decentralised planning is possible. The idea of dismantling of central planning in favour of market-based decentralisation is inappropriate for the purpose of development in the world economy.

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  Occasional  Paper 7  (July 2005) :   

Capital inflows into India in the post-liberalization period: An empirical investigation   by Dr. Indrani Chakraborty       indrani@idsk.org    

Abstract       

This paper examines the time series properties of the foreign capital inflows into India in the 1990s, particularly in the period that follows certain liberalization measures in the financial sector. An analysis of the quarterly data on net inflow of capital for the period 1993 to 2003 shows that it has been volatile. However, not all the components of aggregate capital inflows have moved in similar fashion. The paper further analyses how capital inflows adjusted to changes in real exchange rate and other macroeconomic variables in India since 1993. The econometric results indicate that an error-correction mechanism was operating between net inflows of capital and the real exchange rate. Macroeconomic fundamentals did not have any significant effect on the dynamic adjustment of capital inflows, and a co-integration relationship exists between net inflows of capital, real exchange rate and interest rate differential. We argue that co-movement in these variables was due to intervention by the Reserve Bank of India in the foreign exchange market. This policy helped prevent the volatility of the real exchange rate in spite of volatility in net inflows of capital.    

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 Occasional  Paper 8  (August 2005) :   

The Construction of the Hindu Identity in Medieval Western Bengal :The Role of Popular Cults by Shri Jawhar Sircar

Abstract   

This paper is basically a study of the Dharma cult, one of the major schools of the genre of Mangal Kavyas, and its absorption in the 'greater tradition' of Hinduism in medieval western Bengal from a historical perspective. Though it began from an anthropological field study of Jamalpur in Barddhaman district of West Bengal in the 1990s and later covered 271 other sites of the cult, the author expanded his theme to analyze the complex terrain of a longer period of social history of the western Rarh region of the undivided Bengal. The paper tries to build an interesting meta narrative of Hindu identity in western Bengal and to modify a few existing ones for this specific region. While largely accepting the celebrated Eaton thesis for the Islamization of eastern Bengal from the sixteenth century onwards, it raises significant questions about its relevance for the Western part of Bengal. The paper identifies the overwhelming importance of the three phenomena for the latter region, namely, the impact of the Chaitanya movement, the social significance of the Mangal Kavya campaigns in medieval Bengal (for the acceptance of the popular deities) and a widespread peasantization of the various low antyaja castes of the Rarh region from the sixteenth down to the twentieth centuries. The larger impact of the phenomena on religion and demography has also been analyzed on the time framework of half a millennium, while the peculiarities of the emergence of the Hindu agricultural castes in the western Bengal have been highlighted. The author ends with the suggestion of a modification of the processual aspects of Srinivas' Sanskritization thesis: the study of a step-by-step mechanism of the absorption of Dharma cult in Rarh region, as evidenced in the heightened activity from 'above', i.e., of the considerable number of poor Brahmans of the locality. The paper introduces an economic dimension by arguing that impoverished pujaris entered, for livelihood reasons, the religion of the peripheral but populous antyaja and agricultural castes - bringing them thereby into the fold of a Hindu identity.

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