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ABSTRACT While transnational commercial surrogacy in India has recently attracted the attention of journalists and feminist scholars critical of a novel and particularly intimate example of labor outsourcing, surrogacy in India is not only about global inequalities. In this research report, I call attention to silences in the most well-known accounts of surrogacy to the persistent local inequalities that structure infertility treatment in general-and surrogacy in particular. I argue that the disappearance of medical professionals' perceptions of surrogates as 'laborers' and of Indian infertility experiences in these accounts occurs not only because of significant challenges to data collection, but also because of widespread naturalization of inequality. Local inequalities that structure transnational surrogacy in India, in particular, and infertility treatment, in general, tend to escape the purview of examinations that employ a transnational frame. Most research on gestational surrogacy in India does not focus on the options available to Indians who face infertility. The few studies that put the dynamics of infertility among people living in India at the center of analysis have yet to explore fully the 'reproscapes' of infertility among people in India. [ surrogacy, infertility, inequality, India, transnational] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the need for inclusive economic development in India, with a focus on the prevalence of human trafficking which targets women, children, and the poor. Topics include the financial pressures faced by Indian children making it necessary for them to work to support their families, the impact of Indian government reforms aimed at liberalizing the economy, increasing private investments, and stimulating economic activity, and the challenges of combating poverty in India posed by corruption, exploitation, and human rights violations.

This essay addresses the question of how the ethical values of the postcolonial subject are classed and gendered. A certain kind of postcolonial citizen, enjoying the privileges of birth and position, expresses an attitude that is best described (if somewhat anachronistically) as noblesse oblige. I focus on the writings of a handful of post-Independence Indian women writers, in particular Shama Futehally's novel Tara Lane (1993), as exemplifying this attitude. My essay will draw upon discussions by Indian feminists which, in different genres and informed by different politics, have set the stage for this historical, autobiographical and conceptual inquiry. Reading Indian women's fiction and Indian feminist theory and politics together, I trace their disjunctures and overlaps, merging these into an ethico-political inquiry about women and citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the political and performative shift in representations of same-sex desire within the context of neoliberal urbanism in Bengaluru, India. The affective shift from labile sexual practices to defiant assertions of sexual identity over the past two decades warrants a conjunctural analysis that tracks the intersections between neoliberal cultures of consumption and liberal rhetorics of equal rights and freedom of choice. Focusing on the queer subject in Mahesh Dattani's dramatic oevre, this article considers progressivist accounts of same-sex desire in neoliberal Bengaluru over the past two decades. By examining how non-normative sexual practices are disciplined into the epistemological categories of LGBT identity politics, the essay charts the itineraries of 'queer' as it travels to India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the emergence of the Denotified Rights Action Group (DNG-RAG), a national social movement orchestrated to assert the citizenship rights of adivasi (indigenous) populations in India. It assesses the movement's efforts to engage the central Indian government in meaningful dialogue to accommodate the inclusion of marginalized adivasis in the democratic politics of the nation. In doing so, the DNT-RAG reasserts the primacy of the Indian state as the principal engine driving the project of nation building, and as such, the site that activists target to further an agenda of equitable development and democratic rights for those known as India's Denotified Tribes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide the first global assessment of the sources of population aging by tracing its origins to the demographic histories of more and less developed countries. In more developed countries, improvements in survival among successive cohorts have accounted for the large majority of the recent increase in the population's mean age. Improved survivorship and declines in the growth rate of births have made roughly equal contributions to the aging that is occurring in less developed countries. Aging is more rapid in less developed countries because the number of births has declined faster, with China and India making large contributions. Use of the proportion of the population above age 65, 70, or 75 as measures of aging produces results similar to those using the mean age. Mortality decline becomes an even larger contributor to aging using all these measures, and its contribution grows as age advances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inclusion of marginalized sections and minorities remains one of the most vexing problems for democratic politics. This article discusses the enactment of a recent Indian law, 'The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Rights) Act, 2006', as exemplifying the possibilities of inclusion of marginalized groups in democratic processes. The law was enacted in response to a nationwide mobilization of marginalized forest dwellers and their advocates demanding rights over forests. Grassroots-level formations representing forest dwellers came together across scales and spaces to form a network that successfully negotiated India's democratic politics to achieve the passage of the law. The case illustrates the role of grassroots mobilizations in creating alternate discourses of legitimacy, networking across scales and locations, and using spaces provided by representative democracy to include the voices and demands of the marginalized in democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among Tibetans living in exile in India, expressions of longing and sadness for family, friends and places in Tibet are not uniformly shared across members of the community. Time and distance have faded and idealized their homeland in the memories of long-term exiles. Yet, for a segment of this community called New Arrivals, who have only relatively recently left Tibet, people and places 'back home' are real and immediate. The immediacy of these ties to Chinese Tibet, however, often engenders perceptions of New Arrivals as Sinicised, backward and uneducated. This paper focuses on these New Arrivals in the enclave of McLeod Ganj, India, home to the Tibetan exile government and approximately 7,000 Tibetan exiles. In this predominately Tibetan area, the division between long-term exiles and New Arrivals constitutes the dominant social boundary among McLeod Ganj Tibetans, a division that is most prominent among McLeod Ganj's Tibetan youth. Drawing from community discourses, social networks and practices, and educational institutions, I analyse everyday written forms (e.g., poetry, letters, diary entries) to suggest that through these writings, New Arrival youth are constituting and reconstructing their marginalized position within the community. In an exile community where resources are limited, improving the position of New Arrivals can be challenging. Here, I suggest two approaches to the difficulties these youth face. First, re-educating the larger Tibetan community in order to breakdown the prejudices that exist toward these new exiles. Second, refashioning the existing educational institutions for New Arrivals to better prepare them for employment in the Tibetan communities or elsewhere in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the political and social economy of care in India through a focus on childcare practices, from the viewpoint of the care giver - a perspective frequently ignored or touched on only generally in earlier discussions on development or social policy. It is argued that the care regime is an ad hoc summation of informal, stratified practices. It is shaped by the institutional context, in particular the economic and social inequalities of work and livelihoods, as well as trends and absences in state economic and social policy. Central to the dynamics of care practices in India is the ideology of gendered familialism in public discourse and policy, which reiterates care as a familial and female responsibility and works to devalue and diminish the dimensions of care. By delineating the range of institutions through which everyday childcare practices are organized, this contribution draws out the differentiations and actualities of stratified familialism and care. At one end of the spectrum are those who have the possibility to retain familial carers at home and supplement them with paid and other institutional carers; at the other are those who are neither able to retain family members at home nor fill the care gap through formal institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's 2005 Right to Information Act (RTIA) is among dozens of national laws recently adopted similar to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Drawing on several large studies examining the act's implementation, the author finds that Indian citizens filed about 2 million requests for information under the RTIA during its first two and half years. However, use of the law was constrained by uneven public awareness, poor public planning, and bureaucratic indifference or outright hostility. Requirements for proactive disclosure of information are often ignored. The necessary mechanisms for enforcing the new law are also strained by a growing number of complaints and appeals. Nonetheless, RTIA advocates demonstrate its transformative potential and continue to press energetically for more effective implementation. Public authorities and civil society organizations have developed a number of practical innovations that may be useful for other developing countries to adopt when considering similar laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the privatization and comparative efficiency of sanitation services in India. It explores the main reason on the failure of the country's government partners and the World Bank Group to recognize and address the intolerable working conditions of Dalit sanitation workers in the country. It highlights the concepts of the theory of thought-styles which was associated on the identification of how institutionalized approaches in the development management (DM) field can hinder consideration of human dignity and justice for sanitation workers in the country.

To what extent has legislation recognized the rights and obligations of family and kinship? What are the repercussions of the new ideals set by modern Hindu law and welfare services on marriage, family, and kinship of the Lingayās? The author interviewed 115 heads of the Lingayāt households in Dhārwar City. The findings reveal that the new legislation, incorporating the modern egalitarian values which are strikingly opposed to the traditional norms, tends to rupture kinship relationships. In the absence of comprehensive social security programs, an overwhelming majority of the people still depend on the family and kinship in times of crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that after a debate of several days, the Constituent Assembly of the State of India in New Delhi adopted a seven-point article on fundamental rights last December. Unlike the United Nations, which in framing a bill of human rights seemed to be totally unaware that man has special rights to the land and natural resources, the Indian legislators were aware that any adequate statement on fundamental rights involved man's right to the earth. V. Pontethrai welcomed these provisions saying Harijans would henceforth be enabled to acquire land, a right they had hitherto not enjoyed. Deshpande Gupta also welcomed the general rights to acquire land." What these allusions mean precisely this writer will be in no position to know until some specialist in Indian land economics analyzes the article and the debate in this or some other journal in the field.