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This article discusses Romania's burgeoning development aid policy to the post-colonial space. By leveraging its expertise in petroleum extraction to forge a strategic relationship with India in the 1950s, Bucharest was able to gain a strategic foothold as oil assistance provider to the non-aligned countries. This text details Romania's efforts to help build India's national oil industry by bringing into focus the broad nexus of forces at play in such process. It therefore aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of 'the Second World's Third World' by discussing the ideological and geopolitical considerations of both East-East and East-South relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Foreign Direct Investment plays a very vital role in the development of the nation. Domestic capital is inadequate for the purpose of overall development of the country. Foreign capital is the way by which we can fill the gaps between saving and investment of domestic economy. In present scenario, Indian Economy is one of the most emerging economies of the world today. In the last two decades world has been extensive inflow of FDI into developing countries. Many developing countries are in competition with each other to attract FDI. Since 2014, India has emerged as of the top foreign destination in the world with a significant rise in FDI. Foreign Investment in India started back in 1991 after implementation of New Economic Policy. During 2000s, there is a big rise in Foreign Direct Investment in India. This paper focuses on secondary data based Sectoral Analysis of the inflow of FDI in India during 2000 to 2019. This paper also focuses on FDI policy framework, country-wise, equity wise FDI inflow in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence is being reconfigured as a set of technologies that can address poverty with precision. The impacts of AI will both exacerbate and ameliorate the conditions of uneven development. Recent debates focus on the disruptive effects of AI, particularly to replication of development trajectories that have had success in reducing poverty. In this paper we further these debates by analysing the backroads of AI. The backroads serve as a metaphor for understanding the ways AI will travel from the sites of incubation to the frontlines of uneven development. We explore dialogues between AI and development in two arenas: the World Bank's Development Impact Evaluation initiative (DIME) and the Government of India's national AI strategy, #AIforAll. We argue that both these arenas serve as hubs from which AI will travel out along the backroads to remote, poor, and fragmented polities. While the World Bank utilises AI as technology to empower experts and mobilise a techno‐political authority, what we refer to as precision AI, India seeks to function as a second‐tier AI hub, making AI cheaper and more accessible domestically and for other developing countries, what we refer to as populist AI. We conclude by discussing the interrelations of precision and populist AI along the backroads, and the potential of backroads research for mapping AI, uneven geographies of development and technology and the impacts of AI's disruptions at different scales. Artificial intelligence is being reconfigured as a set of technologies that can address poverty with precision. We further these debates by analysing the backroads of AI in two arenas: the World Bank's Development Impact Evaluation initiative (DIME) and the Government of India's national AI strategy #AIforAll. While the World Bank utilises AI as technology to empower experts and mobilise a techno‐political authority, what we refer to as precision AI, India seeks to function as a second‐tier AI hub, making AI cheaper and more accessible domestically and for other developing countries, what we refer to as populist AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay critically examines the discourse of participation in development finance directed at the poor in the Global South from national and international development agencies. This discourse, often termed financial inclusion, posits the ability of development actors to reach the poor involving them in important economic decisions affecting their lives, provides access to products that improve their material conditions, and ensures their credit worthiness through highly nuanced information technology and social media tools. The paper presents evidence from two ethnographically inspired studies undertaken by the author in India and Kenya to ascertain the ways in which the participatory discourse in finance is understood among societal participants themselves. The paper presents relevant epistemes for analyzing what 'grassroots' actors understand as their participation in development-oriented financial inclusion projects. The study forwards two major conclusions: (1) 'habits of authority' among various development actors thwart effective participation; (2) technology platforms that allow for successive innovations and interconnections from businesses and other organizations encourage financial inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use deconstructive theory to analyze the category of "millet" and the endangerment of food grains in India. I argue that "millet" cohered as a sign of difference from the 1960s through India's Green Revolution, which created a national infrastructure for the materialization of colonial and masculinist ideology. In the hills of Uttarakhand and through the food grain regionally known as mandua, we see how India's postcolonial success relied on the ontological-epistemic erasure of women's food/land practices and assaulted the intertwined "rootedness" (place-making faculties) of women and the crops they cultivate. Reading mandua as "millet" under erasure (millet) reveals how mixed crop systems and practices of socio-ecological reciprocity eroded in the face of Green Revolution ideology and functioned as a bulwark against it. I turn finally to the counterhegemonic potential of "millet," as Uttarakhandi seed activists link with decentralized third world networks, which are exchanging seeds and building power across and from marginalized places. This opens a potential space of visibility and belonging for Uttarakhandi women farmers in the national arena at a time when the ecological and alimentary value of "millet" has entered national and global conversations, infusing the sign of difference with new meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the determinants of stated individual support towards environmental action. The analysis is realized by means of an original Partial Least Squares Path model of Environmental Awareness-Social Capital-Action and it is based on survey data provided in the fifth wave of the World Values Survey (2005–2009) regarding 34.612 individuals from 42 different countries. Besides the global estimates obtained on the whole set of countries, the paper proposes a subsample analysis for developed and developing countries, as well as country analyses for four major economies: China, India, Germany and the United States. We find that environmental awareness and trust in not-for-profit organizations are important determinants of individual action in support of environmentally friendly policies. In general, trust in science and technology does not crowd-out individual support towards the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As social scientists engaged in Information Technologies for Development (IT4D), a question we need to necessarily engage with is “are we building a better world with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)?” This question, first posed by Professor Geoff Walsham in the IS field, was the topic of my plenary discussion at the IFIP 9.4 meeting in Jamaica 2014, and had now been further developed to this “view from practice” paper for this journal. A first step in this paper has been the reformulation of the question which Professor Walsham raised: “What distortions and obstacles are created by the historical, material, and institutional conditions, and how these shape our efforts of ICTs creating a better world?” This reformulation is done to bring in more explicitly the political dimension into the question, and to nuance the technological deterministic argument implied in the question of technology (always) creating a better world. Taking an empirical example of an ICT intervention from the public health sector in India, deliberately chosen to emphasize distortions typically seen is similar Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) projects, the analysis focuses on understanding the conditions of distortions, why they occur, and what can be done differently to contribute to our notion of a better world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Empirical studies of social capital rarely take into account the socioeconomic context of the region in which it operates, indeed as most of this research has been located in high income countries. It is imperative to investigate how development may influence the impact of social capital, especially in developing countries. This paper examines the relationship between social capital and child nutrition using the India Human Development Survey, 2005-2006. Using a multilevel framework and a sample of 6770 rural children under the age of five, it finds that household based bridging social capital, expressed as connections with development based organizations, is positively associated with child nutrition. Bonding social capital, expressed as ties with caste and religious based organizations, has the opposite impact. At the village level, contextual measures of social capital are associated with nutritional status of children, but their influence is conditional on local development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]