Articles by Ignatius Chithelen

This note seeks to examine why thousands of Indian professionals in the US go on to start their own business and why the same phenomenon does not occur in India, at least not on a similar scale. The key factor behind the success in the US is the easier access to capital through the public equity markets. So policies that promote similar access in India will enable more professionals to become first generation entrepreneurs. State governments that implement such policies will find the financial burden to be small. While driven by their desire for wealth and growth, many of the new capitalists are likely to back positive changes in areas like education.

The demand for skilled Indian labour in IT is big and growing in the US. But as more US jobs move to India, the constraints of supply of skilled, English-speaking professionals are likely come to the fore. If this leads to a drop in service quality, American businesses, already under attack for fuelling job losses in US, may be forced to close their operations in India. The experience of Ireland, which in recent years has seen a reversal of the growth of outsourcing serves as a warning example.

Origins of Co-operative Sugar Industry in Maharashtra Ignatius Chithelen An attempt is made in this paper to understand the origins of the development of the co-operative sugar industry in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, The conditions leading to the emergence of a rich peasant strata in the region in the early 1900s and the relevant characteristics of the peasantry are discussed in Section I The spread of canal irrigation, coupled with financial support from a co-operative credit infrastructure, enabled the rich peasants to cultivate sugarcane, extensively as well as intensively, as seen in Sections II and III.


BOMBAY Reprieve, But No Protection Ignatius Chithelen EACH day around 350 people enter Bombay nursing a burning hope that the industries and establishments in the city might require an additional pair of hands. From 2,7 million in 1951 to about 8 million at present the population of the city has been exploding; so too the need for anything which resembles a house. While ap- proximately 10 per cent of the population lived in slums in 1947 and 18 per cent in 1961, by 1977 the figure had shot up to 40 per cent with another 10 per cent occupying old, dilapidated buildings, many of them worse than the slums.