The RTI Story: Power to the People

The RTI Story: Power to the People
Author: Aruna Roy
Publisher: Roli Books Private Limited
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2018-05-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 8193704916

Aruna Roy resigned from the IAS in 1975 to work with peasants and workers in rural Rajasthan. In 1990 she helped co-found the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS). The MKSS struggles in the mid 90s for wages and other rights gave birth to the now celebrated Right to Information movement. Aruna continues to be a part of many democratic struggles and campaigns. This book is a collective history that tells the story of how ordinary people can come together and prevail against great odds, to make democracy more meaningful.

RTI Success Stories in India

RTI Success Stories in India
Author: Asha Kanta Sharma
Publisher: BookRix
Total Pages: 58
Release: 2020-07-21
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 3748750900

The book lists out a number of the funny in addition to serious success testimonies by the use of the energy of the Right to Information (RTI) Act in India. Corruption do have very harmful effects on financial and political development. Corruption together of the oldest phenomenon in human society exist in each country times. Corruption are regularly defined in a few ways like preferred sickness of body politics, public exploitation and abuse of position for personal gain. The causes of corruption also are many in number. For instance, cultural element, psychological element and system related factors may additionally reason corruption in each society. There are a few factors like monopoly energy, discretionary electricity and weak responsibility of public officials can also give opportunities for corrupt acts. Corruption may also decrease the performance of public spending, lower the budget revenues, raise the deficit, restrict Foreign Direct Investment, reduce the effectiveness the usage of aid, deplete political legitimacy and hinders the democratic development. The anticorruption marketing campaign need to mainly don't forget the reforms of government officials, judiciary machine, tax and custom departments.

Classes of Labour

Classes of Labour
Author: Jonathan Parry
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 549
Release: 2020-03-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351362844

Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town is a classic in the social sciences. The rigour and richness of the ethnographic data of this book and its analysis is matched only by its literary style. This magnum opus of 732 pages, an outcome of fieldwork covering twenty-one years, complete with diagrams and photographs, reads like an epic novel, difficult to put down. Professor Jonathan Parry looks at a context in which the manual workforce is divided into distinct social classes, which have a clear sense of themselves as separate and interests that are sometimes opposed. The relationship between them may even be one of exploitation; and they are associated with different lifestyles and outlooks, kinship and marriage practices, and suicide patterns. A central concern is with the intersection between class, caste, gender and regional ethnicity, with how class trumps caste in most contexts and with how classes have become increasingly structured as the ‘structuration’ of castes has declined. The wider theoretical ambition is to specify the general conditions under which the so-called ‘working class’ has any realistic prospect of unity.

Adivasis and the State

Adivasis and the State
Author: Alf Gunvald Nilsen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1108759017

In Adivasis and the State, Alf Gunvald Nilsen presents a major study of how subalternity is both constituted and contested through state-society relations in the Bhil heartland of western India. The book unravels the historical processes that subordinated Bhil Adivasi communities to the everyday tyranny of the state and investigates how social movements have mobilised to reclaim citizenship. In doing so, the book also reveals how collective action from below transform the meanings of governmental categories, legal frameworks, and universalising vocabularies of democracy. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India. Towards this end, Adivasis and the State contributes a sustained and nuanced Gramscian analysis of hegemony in order to interrogate the possibilities and limits of subaltern political engagement with state structures.

Rehabilitating Lochner

Rehabilitating Lochner
Author: David E. Bernstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2011-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226043533

In this timely reevaluation of an infamous Supreme Court decision, David E. Bernstein provides a compelling survey of the history and background of Lochner v. New York. This 1905 decision invalidated state laws limiting work hours and became the leading case contending that novel economic regulations were unconstitutional. Sure to be controversial, Rehabilitating Lochner argues that the decision was well grounded in precedent—and that modern constitutional jurisprudence owes at least as much to the limited-government ideas of Lochner proponents as to the more expansive vision of its Progressive opponents. Tracing the influence of this decision through subsequent battles over segregation laws, sex discrimination, civil liberties, and more, Rehabilitating Lochner argues not only that the court acted reasonably in Lochner, but that Lochner and like-minded cases have been widely misunderstood and unfairly maligned ever since.

Capitalism

Capitalism
Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 121
Release: 2014-04-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1608464296

The “courageous and clarion” Booker Prize–winner “continues her analysis and documentation of the disastrous consequences of unchecked global capitalism” (Booklist). From the poisoned rivers, barren wells, and clear-cut forests, to the hundreds of thousands of farmers who have committed suicide to escape punishing debt, to the hundreds of millions of people who live on less than two dollars a day, there are ghosts nearly everywhere you look in India. India is a nation of 1.2 billion, but the country’s one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India’s gross domestic product. Capitalism: A Ghost Story examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India and shows how the demands of globalized capitalism have subjugated billions of people to the highest and most intense forms of racism and exploitation. “A highly readable and characteristically trenchant mapping of early-twenty-first-century India’s impassioned love affair with money, technology, weaponry and the ‘privatization of everything,’ and—because these must not be impeded no matter what—generous doses of state violence.” —The Nation “A vehement broadside against capitalism in general and American cultural imperialism in particular . . . an impassioned manifesto.” —Kirkus Reviews “Roy’s central concern is the effect on her own country, and she shows how Indian politics have taken on the same model, leading to the ghosts of her book’s title: 250,000 farmers have committed suicide, 800 million impoverished and dispossessed Indians, environmental destruction, colonial-like rule in Kashmir, and brutal treatment of activists and journalists. In this dark tale, Roy gives rays of hope that illuminate cracks in the nightmare she evokes.” —Publishers Weekly

We the People

We the People
Author: Nikhil Dey
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2020-08-10
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9353058775

Who are the people of India? What are their rights? What are their claims on the Indian Constitution and on democracy? As a part of Samruddha Bharat Foundation's series Rethinking India, We the People brings together a collection of essays that explores the interesting process of the germination and growth of undisputed universal rights, and of them being developed as tangible entitlements in India. The essays also examine the continuing challenge of establishing, realizing and protecting these entitlements. The authors are academics, activists and practitioners with a strong relationship with social movements and therefore uniquely placed to link practice to theory. Their narratives trace the use of the rights-based framework of the Indian Constitution by socio-political movements in order to strengthen the economic, cultural and social rights of ordinary Indians. The multiple perspectives draw upon and contextualize the complex relationship of the citizen with the state, society and the market in democratic India. Their sharp critiques have a counterpoint in stories of creative, successful alternatives designed by peoples' collectives. There is both an explicit and implicit challenge to conservative notions of 'market-led development' that see competition and profits as central to 'progress' and success. These essays look at the theoretical demands for changing the status quo, but also for working out the nuts and bolts of such change. The essays showcase the continuing dialectic between established constitutional rights and shifting state policy. The crisis unleashed by the response to COVID-19 has exposed the fault lines of this dilemma dramatically. It is an irony that when the government has to exponentially expand its capacity to deliver health, employment and food to people, it has no recourse but to the framework of the same rights-based legislation it has constantly tried to run down. These essays provide invaluable insight at a time when many sacred pillars of neoliberal 'globalization' are crumbling, and the capitalist superstructure is itself turning to the state for survival. They will promote understanding, scholarship and enliven debates as we continue to search for answers in uncertain and challenging times.

Power to the People

Power to the People
Author: Aruna Roy
Publisher: Lotus Collection
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-02-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9788193984628

Power to the People: The Right to Information Story, is the story of a campaign that evolved into a genuine and vibrant people's movement. Culled from the voices of people, often such stories only feed into the research of scholars, largely unacknowledged and forgotten. The dominant narrative is always from the perspective of the ruler and single individuals. One had hoped that democracy would set it right. But the people who are the primary contributors to the discourse always remain on the fringes. Written by Aruna Roy with the MKSS collective, this book is for everyone who asks questions, seeks answers to fight corruption and injustice and challenges arbitrary power. It is a celebration of commitment laced with humour, the struggle, the songs, the theatres of protest, long spells on the street and drafting a peoples' law.

Local Knowledge Matters

Local Knowledge Matters
Author: Nugroho, Kharisma
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2018-07-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1447348087

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. This book explores the critical role that local knowledge plays in public policy processes as well as its role in the co-production of policy relevant knowledge with the scientific and professional communities. The authors consider the mechanisms used by local organisations and the constraints and opportunities they face, exploring what the knowledge-to-policy process means, who is involved and how different communities can engage in the policy process. Ten diverse case studies are used from around Indonesia, addressing issues such as forest management, water resources, maritime resource management and financial services. By making extensive use of quotes from the field, the book allows the reader to ‘hear’ the perspectives and beliefs of community members around local knowledge and its effects on individual and community life.

Iraq, Inc.

Iraq, Inc.
Author: Pratap Chatterjee
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2011-01-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1609800133

More than one year after the "fall of Baghdad," the reconstruction of Iraq was failing terribly. Ordinary Iraqis waited in line for basic necessities like clean water and fuel, while the number of civilians and soldiers killed escalated in tandem with the billions of U.S. tax dollars spent. In Iraq, Inc.: A Profitable Occupation, Pratap Chatterjee delivers an on-the-ground account of the occupation business, exposing private contractors as the only winners in this war. Chatterjee examines the big failings and even bigger swindles of Iraq's corporate managers, from the dangerous follies of an out-of-touch government-in-exile to the unchecked price gouging by Cheney's successors at Halliburton. In Iraq, Inc. Chatterjee contrasts the employment boom of mercenaries--more than 20,000 soldiers of fortune from apartheid-era South Africa, Pinochet's Chile, and elsewhere in Iraq--with the crowds of unemployed locals ripe for recruitment to the resistance. Drawing on years of research and first-hand experience in the region including his live reporting from post-invasion Iraq as he traveled around the country first in December 2003 when Saddam Hussein was captured and in April 2004 during the height of the siege of Fallujah, Chatterjee brings us the dilapidated hospitals, looted ministries, and guarded corporate enclaves that mark the plunderous road to America's free Iraq.