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Since the initiation of the New Economic Policy in 1991, India's power policy illustrates the crystallization of a form of situated rationality that relies on capitalist competitiveness and foreign investment for growth and development. This paper, using critical discourse analysis, examines the resettlement of the Enron/Dabhol Power Project to highlight how this situated rationality represents power/knowledge that "legitimizes" prioritization of international capital, erosion of national sovereignty, and facilitates capitalist exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian economy suffered a balance of payment crisis in 1991, which provided the context for the rolling out of neoliberal policies, also referred to as the New Economic Policy in India. This paper examines the national and global causes and context of India's economic crisis and adoption of neoliberal policies. While grounding my analysis in historical-geographical materialism, I argue that India's economic crisis was a product of certain contingent conditions. I draw attention to India's pre-neoliberal economic regime and analyse how the earlier-established relationship between revenue generation and expenditure ran into trouble; what changes occurred in the organization and management of revenues and capital; nature of interventions of the state in the circulation of capital; changes in the physical aspects of circulation of commodities, together with foreign trade and the formation of the 'world market'; and the rise of the United States as the only global superpower. I conclude that India's economic crisis of 1990-91, and the neoliberal policies that followed, are products of contingent historical and geographical conditions. A teleological approach towards examining global capitalism and production of economic crisis often neglect such contingencies and provide a set of causalities that may, at best, be classified as incomplete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa and India are viewed as incipient economic powerhouses of the developing world – South Africa is the biggest economy on the African continent and India a rising star in the global economy. Both countries have adopted neoliberal policies. The forms in which neoliberalism has unfolded, however, have been contingent upon the countries’ and utility sector’s historical-geographical context. In this paper we attempt to provide a comparative perspective demonstrating similar processes of neoliberalism in South Africa and India. We examine the contradictory nature of neoliberalism with respect to particular sections of the population – the poor in particular. A broadly political-economy approach is adopted. The paper reveals that there is particular state-market logic driving the delivery of basic services such as water and energy. It is this logic which has undermined the states’ attempts at providing basic services to the poor in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The memorandum of understanding between Enron and the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, signed on 20 June 1992, set in motion the Dabhol Power Project, the largest corporate-led venture in Indian history. But even while the project was gaining official clearance, it attracted considerable local opposition on environmental and livelihood related grounds. Additionally, the fact that Enron was awarded the contract by the Congress Party led state government of Maharashtra, in the absence of procedural transparency and open bidding, entangled the project in deep controversy. This paper, based on fieldwork, examines opposition to the Dabhol Power Project. I particularly focus on the relevance of militant particularism, and the importance of counter-hegemony of the working class and/or the subaltern counter-public in the context of multi-scaled manifestations of neoliberal power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1991, the city of Delhi in India has become a focal point of economic liberalization. Economic liberalization has been accompanied by local government efforts to attract both foreign and domestic investment, particularly in the service sectors of the economy. The attraction of investment has been achieved by spatial reconfiguration, pitting the interest of global and domestic capital against the interest of deprived populations. I herein analyze the unfolding of the neoliberal economic regime in India, the production of space in Delhi, and the ways in which planning and governance in Delhi, geared to attracting foreign investment, have affected slum and industry location and public transport networks. Such spatial reconfiguration has been carried out as part of an effort to make Delhi cleaner. I argue, however, that the current environmental agenda has been co-opted by neoliberals to assert class power by militarizing space to the detriment of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of Enron, an American corporation, in its promotion of the electric power sector in the Dabhol Power Project in India. Under the new economic regime in India, policy changes were followed by nine fast-track private electric power projects in different parts of the country with foreign companies as primary promoters or major collaborators. The new, privately promoted power projects brought into focus the power of foreign capital and neoliberal discourse. Neoliberalism is not about free markets, nor about freedom, nor development of the global South or postsocialist economies but rather a form of power that creates congenial spaces for the extraction of revenue by corporations in countries that were, until recently, relatively less accessible to capitalist exploitation. The research is based on interviews with key informants and archival data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]