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The emergence of broad rural support in West Bengal for the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) is here studied through the history (1960 to present) of two villages in Burdwan district. The focus is on the relationship between the dynamics of village politics and political and ideological changes of the larger polity. Village politics constitutes an important realm of informal rules for political action and public participation where popular perceptions of wider political events and cultural changes are created. The communist mobilization of the late 1960s followed from an informal alliance formed between sections of the educated (and politicized) middle-class peasantry and certain groups (castes) of poor. The middle-class peasantry drew inspiration from Bengal's high-status and literary but radicalized tradition. However, the establishment and dynamics of the alliance, at the local level, can only be understood within the normative framework of the village. The poor appeared previously as marginal to public exercise of village affairs, but were nonetheless able to manipulate resources available to them (numbers, assertion, norms) and thus achieve some leverage vis-a-vis village leaders dependent on man-support or "moral economy" sentiments for legitimacy. The interests of these groups of poor, particularly of the social or cultural kind since the material resources available were very limited, became crucial in the bonds village leaders sought to create to retain their support. Following on this practice, also the CPM's local party leadership, in the 1980s and 1990s, consistently confirmed social aspirations and status considerations. This leads to the conclusions that not only do communist movements too depend on considerations of social status, honours, and symbolic displays of respect but that the scope for change and the manner in which the communist movement can function at the local level derive from popular perceptions, formed and enacted in villages.

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The transition from subsistence agriculture to crop commercialization can raise concerns about food security at the local level. Contributing factors and impacts of this transition and resulting local perspectives on food security issues are examined in the Manali area, Kullu District, Himachal Pradesh, India. The overall purpose of this research was to explore how the transition from a subsistence land-use system of agriculture to commercial cropping has impacted local perspectives of food security. The results indicate that although people feel food secure within the commercial cropping system, new areas of vulnerability to food insecurity has arisen. Climate change, market fluctuations, disease and an increasing reliance on chemicals are among the present challenges and concerns for farmers today. Also, although dietary preferences have changed, traditional crops still have value and importance within the new type of system, providing a sense of security in socio-cultural and religious ways.

The transition from subsistence agriculture to crop commercialization can raise concerns about food security at the local level. Contributing factors and impacts of this transition and resulting local perspectives on food security issues are examined in the Manali area, Kullu District, Himachal Pradesh, India. The overall purpose of this research was to explore how the transition from a subsistence land-use system of agriculture to commercial cropping has impacted local perspectives of food security. The results indicate that although people feel food secure within the commercial cropping system, new areas of vulnerability to food insecurity has arisen. Climate change, market fluctuations, disease and an increasing reliance on chemicals are among the present challenges and concerns for farmers today. Also, although dietary preferences have changed, traditional crops still have value and importance within the new type of system, providing a sense of security in socio-cultural and religious ways.

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This thesis explores labour market processes in urban India. Investigating large and persistent differentials in urban unemployment rates across the Indian states, we find that regions with higher wage push or better amenities have higher unemployment rates, controlling for labour force composition. The differentials are maintained by rural-urban migration rather than by barriers to inter-state migration. Our investigation of wage determination yields evidence of imperfect competition in the labour market which is not simply 'institutional'. Indian firms pay efficiency wages which induce sufficient productivity gains to pay for themselves. After identifying the long and short run structural processes in the labour market, we consider recent aggregate trends in India's factory sector. There was negative employment growth in the 1980s even as output growth touched record levels. Our analysis suggests that this had less to do with wage growth, as proposed by the World Bank, and more to do with increasing work intensity, encouraged by wage incentives, improved infrastructure and increased competition. Considerable slack was inherited from the past, evidence of which flows from the wage and production function estimates. We find that increased labour utilization raises capacity utilization. This is important because Indian industry has chronically carried large excess capacity. A breakthrough in total factor productivity growth accompanied declining employment in the 1980s and has been interpreted as the reward of deregulation in this decade. Existing studies mismeasure productivity growth by neglecting labour utilization (hours) and assuming perfectly competitive product markets. We produce new estimates at the aggregate and industry levels. A natural ceiling to hours worked moderates bad news on the employment front and good news on the productivity front. Our analyses are expected to contribute to the evaluation of current and controversial policy changes in India.

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This study explores the initiatives of the public and private sector in the context of the alleviation of poverty of the rural poor in Bangladesh. The central thesis is that the public sector has made a significant departure, at least in theory, towards the conceptualisation of the rural poor programme in a way that the private sector, particularly the non-governmental organisations, have been performing for the last two decades. This study emphasises the recognition by the NGOs, particularly the "moderate ones, that the nature of both the problems and the solutions change in the process. Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), the "moderate" NGO under study, has gone through a "learn as it goes", responsive, inductive process. This study argues quite the contrary with the public sector initiative. It was only prior to the preparation of the Third Five Year Plan that debates were initiated to seriously criticise the rather sterile two-tier cooperative model for rural poor mobilisation around employment generation and acquisition of assets. Presently, BRDB opened the "flood-gate", which so long prevented the NGOs to contribute to the formulation of the training module of BRDB rural poor programme towards human development and institution building. Although it has been argued that "moderate" NGOs, like BRAC, are not institutions setting about to prove a specific model or theory of development in a dogmatic or absolutist sense, it would be difficult to say that they are not guided by an ideology, as this study argues, when the NGOs themselves have accepted the "Freire-type-conscientisation", which in itself is a loaded concept. This study presents a "mobilising" NGO, where the concept of "conscientisation" has been shown to transcend the limits of present day thinking of moderate NGOs.

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