The Development Reader brings together a set of key readings that explore the changing ways that ideas of development are understood, contested and put into practice. Adam Smith and Karl Marx meet, among others, Robert Wade, Amartya Sen and Jeffrey Sachs, and section and individual extract introductions guide students through the material and bind the readings into a coherent whole.

 

First published in 2010. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Twenty years ago India was still generally thought of as an archetypal developing country, home to the largest number of poor people of any country in the world, and beset by problems of low economic growth, casteism and violent religious conflict. Now India is being feted as an economic power-house which might well become the second largest economy in the world before the middle of this century. Its democratic traditions, moreover, remain broadly intact.

How and why has this historic transformation come about? And what are its implications for the people of India, for Indian society and...