State formation and the political economy of India: The Rudolphian paradigm

Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph were world renowned political scientists and iconic academic couple who devoted six decades of their lives to teaching and researching India and South Asia. The liberal-centrist Rudolphian framework is clearly evident in their numerous works. Their writings show the innovativeness and interpretative richness of methodological pluralism questioning the hegemony of western theories and categories. The Geertzian notion of “culture bound” contextualism was central to their ideas on concept formation and “situated knowledge” paradigm. The phrases like “situated knowledge,” “self as other,” “imperialism of categories,” “modernity of tradition”, “living with difference,” and “post-modern Gandhi” provided newer conceptual tools and vocabularies in their writings. Writing within the broader framework of liberal-centrism, they continued to counter generalizations and deepen our understanding about the puzzle of Indian democracy and nature of the Indian state.     

Paying for Happiness: Experimental Results from a Large Cash Transfer Program in Malawi

This study analyzes the short‐term impact of an exogenous, positive income shock on caregivers’ subjective well‐being (SWB) in Malawi using panel data from 3,365 households targeted to receive Malawi's Social Cash Transfer Program that provides unconditional cash to ultra‐poor, labor‐constrained households. The study consists of a cluster‐randomized, longitudinal design. After the baseline survey, half of these village clusters were randomly selected to receive the transfer and a follow‐up was conducted 17 months later. We find that the short‐term impact of household income increases from the cash transfer leads to substantial SWB gains among caregivers. After a year's worth of transfers, caregivers in beneficiary households have higher life satisfaction and are more likely to believe in a better future. We examine whether program impacts on consumption, food security, resilience, and hopefulness could explain the increase in SWB but do not find that any of these mechanisms individually mediate our results.     

One Plus One can be Greater than Two: Evaluating Synergies of Development Programmes in Malawi

This paper investigates the interplay between the Social Cash Transfer Programme (SCTP) and the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) in Malawi. We take advantage of data collected from a 17-month evaluation of a sample of households eligible to receive SCTP, which also provided information about inclusion into FISP. We estimate two types of synergies: i) the complementarity between SCTP and FISP, that is whether the impact of both interventions run together is larger than the sum of the impacts of these interventions when run separately, and ii) the incremental impact of receiving FISP when a household already receives SCTP, as well as the incremental impact of receiving SCTP when a household already receives FISP. The analysis shows that there are synergies between the two policy interventions, mainly in terms of incremental impacts of each programme over the other, in increasing expenditure, agricultural production and livestock.     

Human rights is not enough: The need for demonstrating efficacy of an ethical approach to interviewing in India

Purpose. The present study compared attitudes about Human Rights (HR) and the advocation of coercive interviewing practices amongst Indian Police Officers, Offenders and a sample from the General Public. Method. 100 Police Officers, 50 Offenders and 50 members of the General Public completed a questionnaire that assessed their attitudes about the Human Rights of suspects and the use of coercion in suspect interviews. Results. Police Officers and the Public accepted both custodial violence and the use of intimidating interrogation strategies more readily than Offenders. They were also more prepared to suspend Suspects' Human Rights. Further, individuals who scored high on a coercive belief scale (CBS) were particularly inclined to favour custodial violence and suspend Human Rights. In addition, the self‐reported frequency with which Police Officers used intimidating and non‐intimidating interviewing techniques was related to their beliefs about Suspects' Human Rights and the extent to which they perceived intimidating interviewing methods to be useful. Conclusion. Attitudes about effective interviewing strategies may well be embedded within a broad social context. The effectiveness of a Human Rights Agenda requires that officers in India are informed of the effectiveness of ethical interviewing standards and the practical and legal dangers of using inappropriate methods.     

Cash Transfers Enable Households to Cope with Agricultural Production and Price Shocks: Evidence from Zambia

Climate change is projected to dramatically disrupt rainfall patterns and agricultural yields in sub-Saharan Africa. These shocks to food production can mire farming households in poverty traps. This study investigates whether unconditional cash transfers can help households cope with agricultural production and price shocks. We find that cash empowers poor, rural households facing these negative shocks to employ coping strategies typically used by the non-poor and enables them to substantially increase their food consumption and overall food security. Extending relatively small cash payments unconditionally to the rural poor is a powerful policy option for fostering climate-resilient development.     

A communist perspective on development strategy for rural India

This article examines the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s strategy for ‘developing’ rural India. The term ‘development strategy’ is, of course, not one that the CPI(M) itself uses to characterise its plans for maturing the revolution in India's countryside. As a matter of fact, its use in the title of this paper is intended primarily to emphasise the point that ‘development’ can mean many different things. It is not the intention of this paper to endorse or deny either the merits of the CPI(M)'s purposes or the sincerity of its revolutionary intent. The limited purpose is to portray, and attempt to understand, Us positions. While differences with these positions are duly recorded, the critique is intended to be ‘immanent’, rather than ‘transcendental’, that is, is intended to be a critique from within the given frame of reference, rather than a critique of its ‘validity’.     

Terrorists' personal constructs and their roles: A comparison of the three Islamic terrorists

It is hypothesized that individuals who play different roles in terrorist organizations will have different psychological processes underlying their activities. An innovative examination of the personal construct systems of terrorists explored this. As part of a larger study, three individuals convicted of Islamic‐related terrorist violence in India were interviewed using a semi‐structured life narrative procedure enhanced by a Repertory Grid (Kelly, 1955/1991). One was a senior leader of a terrorist group, one a subordinate, the third a person who planted a bomb without full knowledge of the larger design he was part of. Principal component analyses of these grids informed by comments from the life narratives were used to elaborate each man's conceptual system and how it related to his commitment to violence. Important differences among the three individuals' in their construct systems were found. This demonstrated that the forms of Jihadi commitment is embedded in the individual's personal construct system. So, although these three case studies can only be taken as providing indicative results, they do point to aspects of construct systems that reveal the potential for disengagement, being most likely present in the lower echelons of terrorist organizations. Those who are unable to reconstrue themselves as having a non‐terrorist future are unlikely to disengage. This is probably typical of those who lead these organizations. The results therefore contribute to the growing literature arguing for significant differences in terrorists' understanding of themselves and their roles and provide an original methodology for assessing a person's potential for deradicalization.     

The Welfare Effects of Balance of Payments Reform: A Micro-Macro Simulation of the Cost of Rent-Seeking

This article proposes a methodology for analysing the effect of balance of payments liberalisation on measures of poverty and distribution and applies it to the case of Jamaica in the 1990s. The methodology consists of a macro-micro simulation in which a CGE model provides labour market outcomes, which in turn are used to manipulate the sectoral allocation of employment to generate the income distribution consistent with the new labour market outcome. In the application to Jamaica, we find that the reallocation of resources away from rent-seeking activities in the presence of exchange controls is significant and has large macroeconomic effects. Opening up of the current account has little effect on poverty, but liberalisation of the capital account reduces poverty, especially amongst the very poor. Neither policy change taken separately, nor the combination of the two, has more than a negligible effect on the distribution of income.     

The determinants of teenage schooling in Jamaica: Rich vs. poor,females vs. males

The belief that schooling is an important way to reduce poverty and increase social mobility has lead to large government‐sponsored investment in education in developing countries. Jamaica has an impressive literacy and primary enrolment rate, yet the ability of its secondary school system to enhance social mobility and reduce inequality is limited. Regression results from a nationally representative household survey show that family background variables (parental education and income) are important determinants of secondary school enrolment, and income is the single most important determinant of enrolment in an ‘elite’ high school, with the impact being twice as large for females. Part of the income effect is shown to represent unobserved community heterogeneity. One conclusion is that the recent ‘cost‐sharing’ education policy of the Jamaican government, if applied selectively to the elite academic high schools, will fall disproportionately upon rich households.     

The Social and Productive Impacts of Zambia's Child Grant

Accumulated evidence from dozens of cash transfer (CT) programs across the world suggests that there are few interventions that can match the range of impacts and cost‐effectiveness of a small, predictable monetary transfer to poor families in developing countries. However, individual published impact assessments typically focus on only one program and one outcome. This article presents two‐year impacts of the Zambian Government's Child Grant, an unconditional CT to families with children under age 5, across a wide range of domains including consumption, productive activity, and women and children's outcomes, making this one of the first studies to assess both protective and productive impacts of a national unconditional CT program. We show strong impacts on consumption, food security, savings, and productive activity. However, impacts in areas such as child nutritional status and schooling depend on initial conditions of the household, suggesting that cash alone is not enough to solve all constraints faced by these poor, rural households. Nevertheless, the apparent transformative effects of this program suggest that unconditional transfers in very poor settings can contribute to both protection and development outcomes.