From the blurb
Culture, Society and Development in India:
Edited by Manoj Kumar Sanyal and
Arunabha Ghosh;
Orient Blackswan,
1/24, Asaf Ali Road,
New Delhi-100002.
This collection of 11 essays, brought out in honour of Amiya Kumar Bagchi, is an attempt to define and develop the key concepts figuring in discourses on culture, society and its plurality in the Indian context — areas in which there is a large volume of literature. To quote Manoj Kumar Sanyal, who has co-edited this volume: “very few economists” of Bagchi’s standing “venture upon writing on diverse subjects ranging from literature to philosophical discourse, from film appreciation to people’s movements…” and on a lot of other themes having social and cultural importance.
The volume discusses a few of such discourses chosen mostly from the collection of Bagchi’s writings titled, “Sanskriti, Samaj, Arthaniti”. The essays, contributed by eminent personalities in those fields — they include Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Pande, Shantanu Bhattacharyya, Sreemati Lal and Indranath Chaudhuri — are organised in four sections.
While the first section addresses some select issues of language and socio-cultural development, the second focusses on a study of women in real life and in fiction. The third and the fourth sections deal with “music and art” and “popular Indian cinema: ideology, culture and business.”
State, Natural Resource Conflicts and Challenges to Governance: Edited by N.C. Narayanan; Academic Foundation, 4772-73/23, Bharat Ram Road, Darya Ganj,
New Delhi-110002. Rs. 795.
An outcome of a workshop organised as part of the silver jubilee celebrations of the Institute of Rural Management Anand, this volume, through its nine articles, explores the role of post-colonial Indian state in the governance of natural resources, and the emerging challenges to it.
Governance demands participation of multiple actors in the societal spheres of state, civil society, and business. And ‘good governance’ postulates perfect harmony among these entities. In the real world, however, conflict is the norm rather than the exception, and studies in this publication examine the competing, and divergent, interests that generate certain forms of natural resource conflicts.
The contributions to this volume comprise a conceptual paper by Nirmal Sengupta on issues related to property rights and legal pluralism, and seven case studies covering the whole gamut of natural resource management activities such as agriculture, fisheries, mining, and pastoralism.
Three of these studies have to do with tribal marginalisation, which is — in the words of N.C. Narayanan, the editor — a “major issue of indigenous rights versus the mainstream development trajectory in the past decades of planned development.”
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