Na shariram nadhi, My body is mine: The urban women’s health movement in india and its negotiation of modernity

This article explores the Indian women’s health movement for productive insights into current debates on the “travelling” meanings of modernity. Taking the feminist demand for bodily autonomy as a starting point for the exploration, the article traces the trajectories described by some of modernity’s central concepts: choice, freedom, autonomy, rights, and [developmental versions of] progress. The journeys described here take place not only between the “global” and the “local,” but between metropole and colony in the colonial period, and between the nation-state and the women’s movement in the postcolonial period. As the case example of the controversy over amniocentesis (used in India in the identification and abortion of female foetuses) illustrates, terms such as choice and development have become central to contestations between the women’s movement, the state, and the professional middle classes.     

India: In Search of the Drivers of the Next Wave of Growth

India’s unprecedented growth since the mid-1990s and increased macroeconomic resilience has been against the backdrop of wide-ranging reforms, growing trade and financial integration, buoyant external demand, and ample global liquidity. Looking ahead, like most emerging markets, India is likely to face stronger headwinds, with less buoyant external financing conditions, and potentially lower growth in advanced markets. This raises questions about the sustainability of growth, sources of future growth, and reform priorities for restoring the momentum of convergence to higher income levels. Using the “distance to frontier” approach, the analysis in this article finds that the sizeable convergence gaps with respect to advanced and other emerging market economies imply considerable opportunities for catch-up. But structural transformation and convergence to higher living standards in India will be conditional on policy and institutional reforms to alleviate market and government failures, as well as on the ability of labor and capital to move toward higher-productivity sectors and activities.     

for reproductive justice in an era of Gates and Modi: the violence of India’s population policies

This article addresses India’s contemporary population control policies and practices as a form of gender violence perpetrated by the state and transnational actors against poor, Adivasi and Dalit women. It argues that rather than meeting the needs and demands of these women for access to safe contraception that they can control, the Indian state has targeted them for coercive mass sterilisations and unsafe injectable contraceptives. This is made possible by the long-term construction of particular women’s lives as devalued and disposable, and of their bodies as excessively fertile and therefore inimical to development and progress. It further considers how population policy is currently embedded in the neoliberal framework of development being pursued by the Indian state. In particular, it argues that the violence of population policies is being deepened as a result of three central and interrelated aspects of this framework: corporate dispossession and displacement, the intensification and extension of women’s labour for global capital, and the discourses and embodied practices of far-right Hindu supremacism. At the same time, India’s population policies cannot be understood in isolation from the global population control establishment, which is increasingly corporate-led, and from broader structures of racialised global capital accumulation. The violence of India’s contemporary population policies and the practices they produce operate at several different scales, all of which involve the construction of certain bodies as unfit to reproduce and requiring intervention and control.