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India’s drylands, located in the states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, receive low rainfall (annual average of 95–1000 mm). Farmers have to rely on the monsoon rains to cultivate crops. Realizing the irrigation water need of the farmers who inhabit the drylands, a non-profit agency called NM Sadguru Water and Development Foundation (hereafter, the Sadguru Foundation), initiated social work based on irrigation water to assist farmers in growing more crops. In this article, we present data on the irrigation-based social work implemented by the Sadguru Foundation across the drylands of western India and how it benefits local farming communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the political aspects of the structural marginalization of Adivasis (Scheduled Tribes) in India. Relating to critical debates about the changing nature of state–society relations in India, the article assesses the argument that the best way for social movements in India to advance their oppositional projects is to harness the state to their attempts to deepen democracy and advance subaltern emancipation. The trajectories of two Adivasi movements in western Madhya Pradesh are analysed, and I discuss the conceptual and political lessons that can be learnt from these case studies in terms of the relationship between subaltern politics and state power in contemporary India. Theoretically grounded in Marxian state theory, the article puts forward the argument that it is necessary to move beyond both anti-statism and state-centrism in order to develop a politically enabling engagement with contemporary Adivasi mobilization in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Armed conflicts have been a permanent feature of the northeastern region since Indian independence. Surprisingly, relentless conflicts in this remote region of India have received little attention in the literature. Although some studies on conflicts in India have made important contributions to understanding and analyzing the causes of conflicts in general, none of them has paid specific attention to the ongoing conflicts in the northeastern region of India. Relative deprivation and persistent economic and political discrimination are often identified as the major causes for armed rebellion in this region. I provide a first quantitative test of this argument, exploring whether deprivation and continual economic and political discrimination explain the probability of armed conflict incidence across nine northeastern states of India during the period 1970–2007. The main findings from probit estimations show that poverty (relative to the rest of the country) and economic and political discrimination explain conflict outbreaks, after controlling for income, population pressures, state capacity, ethnic affiliations, forest area, peace years, neighboring conflict incidence, and distance to New Delhi. The study also reports considerable support for the baseline results when controlling for potential reverse feedback effects using the generalized method of moments. These results are robust to alternative estimation techniques and sample size. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article first surveys the debate about poverty measurement and recent poverty alleviation in India by focusing on the main contributions. The question of whether the economic reforms of the 1990s have accelerated or delayed poverty reduction, or possibly contributed to increased poverty, is addressed by using the state-level computations of the Human Development Index (HDI). It is shown that the HDI of the leading and lagging states converge and that the convergence accelerated in the 1990s. A functional relationship between the poverty index and the HDI is established and used to project the debated end-of-1990s poverty head count. The result confirms a slow-down in poverty reduction in the post-reform period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]