Articles by Saraswati Raju

Capital has an overarching logic of accumulation in general and yet the economic rationale, intercepted by national and local configurations of social power, makes capital unfold differentially in different spaces. The labour market provides an ideal site to interrogate such processes. In India, regional specificities are stark when it comes to the presence of women workers in the public domain, which get significantly obliterated if they are in home-based work. This is because home-based work hinges upon responsibilities of social reproduction and more importantly upon all-pervasive social norms that continue to embed women in traditional constructs of domesticity. It can be argued that in a situation where the market has to become extremely competitive and cost effective, the concept of flexible and cheap labour – the bandwagon of expanding capital – is best articulated through work that is carried out at homes for it can gel comfortably well, in sync with social codes, that assign women to the confines of home even if their status is that of workers.

A study of the micro-level experiences of families in five districts, one each in five states, some of them with the lowest child sex ratios in the country, seeks to explain the complex causes behind the declining ratios by looking at gender and family strategies, shaped by social processes in the urban and rural areas.

Globalisation and macroeconomic reforms have induced a number of discernible changes in Indian agriculture, including a greater policy emphasis on high value crop diversification. It has been argued that moving away from a cropping pattern oriented towards foodgrain production would enable land-poor farmers to sustain and improve their livelihoods. This paper examines issues related to high value diversification in agriculture by taking floriculture as a case study and finds that though the profitability of cut-flowers is substantially higher than that of the traditional crops, the participation of the smaller farmers in flower cultivation is lower compared to most of the other farm-size categories, primarily because of weak linkages with the market. The results indicate that risk aversion is an important impediment to crop-diversification, particularly for the land-poor category of farmers. Schemes to diversify crops are likely to face serious constraints unless resource-related and institutional barriers like access to markets are overcome.

Decline in Sex Ratio: Alternative Explanation Re-Examined Saraswati Raju Mahendra K Premi AN alternative viewpoint on declining sex ratio (SR) by Rajan, Mishra and Navaneetham (December 21, 1991) in response to an earlier write-up by Kundu and Sahu on the same theme (October 12, 1991) by itself is no reason to attempt this note. One of the objectives of academic research is to provoke discussion on matters of importance and the declining sex ratio is one such concern. However, the trio,have not only sorely missed some of the points made by Kundu and Sahu, a certain misintcrprcta tion of their arguments at places is rather disconcerting.