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.

Poor people confront the state on an everyday basis all over the world. But how do they see the state? This book considers the Indian example where people's accounts, in particular in the countryside, are shaped by encounters staged at the local level, and are also informed by ideas circulated by the government and the broader development community. Drawing extensively on fieldwork conducted in eastern India, the authors review a series of key debates in development studies on participation, good governance, and the structuring of political society in South Asia.

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...