The book explores the pattern of rural development in contemporary India from a multidisciplinary and historical perspective. The essays overcome the limits of disciplinary approaches to provide a comprehensive analysis of the processes of change and growth at work in the Indian countryside and to review the social and cultural dynamics that have led to the contemporary situation. Providing an analysis of the economic, political and social changes experienced in rural India, they examine the interactions between actors and institutions at different levels. Some contributions focus on the...

Exploring the quality of capitalist development in provincial India in the post-Green Revolution period, this book argues that the low quality of capitalist development (India s non-farm economy made of villages and small towns) is the joint outcome of the informal economic organisation that is strongly biased in favour of capital and of the complex stratification of the workforce along class and caste lines.

Focusing on the processes of growth induced by the introduction of the high-yield varieties in agriculture, the book demonstrates that a low-road pattern of capitalist development...