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The conventional theoretical and analytical debate surrounding Third World development emphasizes economic development within the interaction of First and Third World. This thesis takes a different approach, not arguing about the correctness or falseness of these approaches, but concentrating on the historical inheritance of political and social values which influence a society. This concept within India highlights the limitation on both economic and political development through traditional fragmentation. This persistence of tradition, such as religion, caste organization, etc., was characterized by persisting traditional forms of political legitimacy. The theoretical concept of political legitimacy serves as analytical tool to examine, how the traditional values persisted in Indian society, and why these values were obstacles to a modern political structure, and therefore hindered adequate political and economic development / Master of Arts

In India, globalized flows of bio-medical discourse, practices and technologies are reshaping the field of reproductive healthcare, and the performance of childbirth more specifically. These projects aim to produce institutional delivery rooms that are "safe and modernized" by equating the utilization of westernized, obstetric techniques for managing delivery with better birth outcomes. Yet, these projects often evoke dynamic tensions between the imagined labor rooms NGOs seek to produce and the lived realties of labor in a local context. In this thesis, I examine the ways NGOs market and disseminate state and global discourses around safe, institutional delivers to local communities through a case study of one NGO working in rural southern Rajasthan. Drawing on data from participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with NGO staff and skilled-birth attendants employed by community health centers, I argue that at the interface of NGO, state, and global relations of power, a commodified discourse in the form of Evidenced-based Delivery (EBD) practices is emerging. This discourse is marketed through a political economy of hope that promotes EBDs as essential for safe delivery. In this system, NGOs function as conduits for transmitting idealized notions of the safe and modern delivery room, and thereby affect a shift in what skilled-birth attendants and communities come to expect from their childbirth experiences -- expectations that I argue are often difficult to meet given current training levels, limited economic resources, and a diverse set of cultural values around childbirth. My findings indicate that while Evidence-based Delivery practices may improve birth outcomes in some contexts, in the delivery rooms of rural Rajasthan, they are functioning essentially as technologies that capitalize on the political economy of hope by evoking the medical imaginary. / Graduation date: 2012

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In this dissertation I offer an explanation for why Indian states are undertaking economic liberalization at different rates, focusing on reforms to the electricity sector. In the period between 1991 and 2003, India's states restructured their electricity systems to vastly different degrees. The dissertation evaluates three variables that feature prominently in the literature on economic policy change: ideological predilections of governing elites, external pressures like those coming from international financial institutions, and state-society interactions. I argue that it is the last explanation, focusing on the degree to which the potential "losers" from reform dominate state politics--that most compellingly accounts for the unevenness in state-level reforms. In my work, I lay greater analytic weight on the role of rural actors than much of the existing literature on the political economy of market reforms. The primary independent variable that explains this variation in reform outcomes is the organization and political strength of societal actors in each state, particularly rural and industrial constituencies, and middle class interests. In some parts of India, the advent of Green Revolution technologies in the late 1960s meant that farmers--chiefly larger landowners--became the primary beneficiaries of extensive development subsidies, including those for electricity. During India's period of economic liberalization in the 1990s, these beneficiaries constituted the main opponents of privatization, which today threatens to change the rules of the game by allocating resources according to market logics. Given these dynamics, where farm sectors are large or well-organized, reform has not proceeded. In the absence of rural political clout, state elites elected to privatize in order to satisfy industrial and urban constituents and signal the state's openness to private capital inflows. By comparing outcomes across states within the single country of India, the research design can control for some variables that are proposed as determinative of government policy, like electoral institutions and macroeconomic shock. I have selected cases to both capture variation of the dependent variable and control for other plausible explanations, such as ideology, financial crisis, and external pressure. / text