DEVELOPMENT, DEPRIVATION AND WELFARE POLICY: Essays in Honour of Prof. Baidyanath Misra

Like most festschrifts, the essays in this volume are not closely connected by a common theme: they cover diverse areas which reflect the varied interests of individual contributors. However, if there is one common thread which runs through these essays, one may call it the political economy of economic reforms and welfarism, and of underdevelopment and social deprivation/exclusion. And this broad theme deals with several perspectives – anthropological, social and economic – with cross-cutting approaches.

In the Indian context, the welfarism of the 1980s brought to the fore the limitations of the state’s direct interventions mainly in the form of subsidy-driven anti-poverty programmes. In particular, it showed how faulty design and inefficient implementation of welfare policies were rooted in the nature of the state mechanism itself – a unitary state which was benevolent enough to act on behalf of the economy and society. In the 1990s, there emerged two opposing paradigms of development mainly as a result of deep economic and fiscal crises of the welfare state – one, which emphasised minimal state intervention to facilitate the processes of globalisation and marketisation, and the other, which emphasised the need for ‘reforms from below’ so as to make development economically sustainable as well as socially responsive and accountable.

The essays in this volume deal with the emerging ‘tension’ between these two paradigms, and should be of interest to all social scientists, development practitioners and policy makers.