The Ministries of Railways and Coal have recently opened up their passenger train and commercial coal mining segments to private participation. With this, there is a growing clamour for setting up independent sectoral regulators for these sectors. This article argues that railways and coal would be better off “regulating by contract” or that the independent sectoral regulators in related sectors may be given the regulatory responsibility of railways and coal, respectively.
The existing research on smart cities in India is situated either in the discursive understanding of the Indian idea of smart or analysis of selected cities’ experiments. Breaking from this dichotomy, it is argued that rolling out of smart cities should be read along a longer history of neo-liberal municipal reforms, which has led to institutional rescaling through the special purpose vehicles and entrenched networks of consultants that drive contemporary urban interventions.
It has been acknowledged that the disparities in the development indicators between north and south Kerala have been reduced significantly post independence. This reduction is typically attributed to developments in the social sector. However, there is considerable difference existing between Malabar and Travancore–Cochin in terms of living standards and key infrastructural facilities. The multidimensional poverty index has also revealed that the incidence of poverty is high in northern Kerala compared to southern Kerala. People-centric policies coupled with decentralisation have effectively reduced the outcome disparity, while the Malabar region still lags behind the Travancore–Cochin region in some key aspects.
The Government of India brought the National Logistics Policy, 2022 envisioning improvement in India’s logistics infrastructure and services. However, the policy has several incongruities, which, if addressed, can make a signifi cant improvement in India’s logistics functioning, including enhanced ease of doing business.
Governing Locally: Institutions, Policies and Implementation in Indian Cities by Babu Jacob and Suraj Jacob, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, New Delhi and Singapore: Cambridge University Press, 2021; pp xxv + 293, $110 (hardback).
The paper focuses on the changing trends in budget allocations of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, especially since the structural adjustment programme that came to be implemented from 1990 and how it has affected civic services, especially health and education. The paper concludes that it has increasingly directed public resources to the private sector and reduced access adversely access to both healthcare and school education for Mumbaikars.
In the context of the pandemic, we evaluate budget 2021–22 and its six-pillar framework. We found lack of clarity as regards allocations under each of the pillars, and hence we undertook to group ministry-wise allocations under each of the pillars. This categorisation was even more liberal than the one that the finance minister herself spelt out. Despite that, we find that the budget fell short of what was required for problems facing the Indian economy.
The growth rate of manufacturing value added has been declining continuously since 2016–17 and it had become negative in 2019–20, even before the intensification of the Covid-19 crisis, suggesting that the budget needs to address the structural weaknesses of the economy. The 2021–22 budget has largely adopted the supply side corrective measures in the form of increased capital expenditure on infrastructure. The potential of infrastructure investment in reviving the sector and the implications of the proposed resource mobilisation for financing the increased capital expenditure are discussed. In the context of increased global fragmentation of production, the feasibility of promoting domestic production through tariff protection is also discussed.
Roads across Manipur are ephemeral, foregrounding the politics behind their development as well as their spatial and temporal nature. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Manipur, this article analyses contemporaneous state practices of infrastructure and its sociopolitical processes, and offers evidence to understand their materialities, forms, and societal relations. The nexus between politicians, contractors, bureaucrats, insurgents and elites causes frequent suspension of road projects, setting a new form of contingent development practice in Manipur.
This paper builds on the work of Steven Jackson to theorise the breakdowns of hydraulic infrastructure not as exception, but as an ordinary condition of living with infrastructure. Rather than take breakdown to be an interruption in the life of infrastructures, it is suggested that breakdowns be read as an initial condition from which new infrastructures emerge through the labour of maintenance and repair. Drawing attention to the extraordinary labour of plumbers, municipal employees and engineers, the paper argues that the invisibilities of infrastructure are themselves contingent on the invisibilisation and subjugation of maintenance workers, who are placed beyond sight to regularly and constantly work to make water flow again.
