Articles by Biplab Dasgupta

This paper attempts to show that the structural adjustment programme formulated by the Bretton Woods organisations that are controlled by the seven richest countries in the world operates exclusively in the less developed countries. How far and to what extent has the adjustment package been introduced to rescue the international banking system facing bankruptcy in the aftermath of the second oil crisis and the debt crisis and/or to find markets for the MNCs of US origin in view of the massive balance of trade deficit that country is incurring every year? The author examines IMF and World Bank conditionalities and reviews the experience of countries which have implemented structural adjustment programmes.

in West Bengal Biplab Dasgupta West Bengal, a very poor and very rural state, has vastly improved its relative position on a broad range of economic, social and rural indicators. Land reforms, the development of panchayats and implementation of poverty alleviation programmes through them, and political mobilisation of the rural poor, are the distinguishing features of development since 1977 which account for this progress. However, the state continues to be backward on certain fronts such as cooperatives and PDS development.

Migrant Labour and Related Issues edited by Vidyut Joshi; Gandhi Labour Institute, Ahmedabad, 1987; pp 334, Rs 125.
IF one prepares a list of the most heavily researched subjects in social science, migration would undoubtedly occupy a position near the top, if not at the very top. In addition, this is also a subject on which practically everyone has a view and claims to know something. Economists, sociologists, political scientists, historians, social anthropologists geographers, social workers, urban planners, voluntary agencies, administrators, there is hardly any discipline left which has not contributed something to the proliferating literature on this subject. By its very nature, it is an inter-disciplinary subject, amenable to treatment from a variety of standpoints.

Biplab Dasgupta The particular pattern of urbanisation in West Bengal

Semi-Capitalist and Capitalist Conditions A Case Study of West Bengal Biplab Dasgupta Two kinds of issues concerning agricultural labourers have excited the interest of academics recently. First, the question how far the growth of agricultural labour is equivalent to a growth of capitalist relations in agricultural production. Whether they are free wage-labourers with the option to choose employers and having no particularly strong 'association with the individuals employing them or whether they are tied to their employers by a variety of pre-capitalist relationships is an issue on which an interesting debate has been going on. Second, the programme of the Left Front government in West Bengal with respect to this class too has become a subject of debate. The question has been raised of the immediate and the long-run perspective of the government's programme to improve their wage, employment and living conditions and the relevance of such reform for other sections of the peasantry.