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This volume highlights some emerging issues in the study of displaced persons in India, like the agency and voices of people who flee across an international border, the identities they forge for themselves, their relations with the hosts and their interactions with the state and non-governmental organizations. Three case studies included here are: (a) ‘Partition refugees’ from East Pakistan to West Bengal, (b) ‘Tamil refugees’ from Sri Lanka to India, and (c) ‘Bangladesh Liberation War refugees’ from East Pakistan to West Bengal. The reader will find that each case is in itself highly complex. The treatment meted out to the displaced people in India has not been consistent. The volume shows that the responses of the state to cross-border displacement have been varied over space and time.

This book challenges the conventional wisdom on American exceptionalism, offering the first and only comparative analysis of the politics of child and in-work tax credits. This comparative approach, analyzing the US, Canada, and the UK, upends everything we thought we knew about the politics of tax credits, accounting for both the timing of their development and the distribution of their benefits among families across liberal welfare regimes. Rather than attributing these changes to antiwelfare attitudes, mobilization of conservative forces, shifts toward workfare, or racial antagonism, the book argues that the growing use of tax credits for social policy was a strategic adaptation to austerity in all three countries but that the historical absence of family allowances in the US left the country with a policy legacy that institutionalized a distinct “logic of tax relief,” ensuring that the poorest American families would be ineligible for tax credits. Focusing on the twin puzzles of the growth and distribution of new tax credits across the three countries, the book explains both their convergence on the use of these tax credits and the US’ divergence from the UK and Canada on the distribution of these tax credits’ benefits.

The phenomenal growth of penal confinement in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century is still a public policy mystery. Why did it happen when it happened? What explains the unprecedented magnitude of prison and jail expansion? Why are the current levels of penal confinement so very close to the all-time peak rate reached in 2007? What is the likely course of levels of penal confinement in the next generation of American life? Are there changes in government or policy that can avoid the prospect of mass incarceration as a chronic element of governance in the United States? This study is organized around four major concerns: What happened in the 33 years after 1973? Why did these extraordinary changes happen in that single generation? What is likely to happen to levels of penal confinement in the next three decades? What changes in law or practice might reduce this likely penal future?

This book is about migration futures: the transnational movement of people and the portability of skills in a globalizing world. It explores why in recent decades, development has produced outcomes so different from what was proclaimed to be its goal resulting in the ‘Great Divergence’—a world unequal as never before. International migration must be seen in the context of the political economy of development and as the natural corollary to international trade and capital. In the post 2015 development context, sustaining global economic growth rates, expanding economic opportunity, democratizing human welfare, and progressing towards an equitable and just global order will be predicated substantially on the free movement of people. Over time, the policy and practice on international migration of most countries has only become more restrictive. The consequence has been high costs—both fiscal and human. The barriers to freer economic migration have distorted development outcomes globally. There is urgent need for a global framework that is rule based, non-discriminatory, and democratic to govern the transnational movement of people. The scale and spread of the Indian experience in migration as well as development and the intimate interplay of these two complex processes is matchless. International migration is as important for the world as for India to be left to uninformed debate or fragmented interventions. The challenge is to articulate a coherent policy framework and undertake coordinated modes of engagement. Failure to mainstream economic migration will jeopardize the basis of a modern, progressive, and democratic future for all.

Poverty was the predominant paradigm within which science policy was constructed in the late colonial, nationalist, and post-independence eras of India. Whether as critics of its poverty or as architects of measures for its poverty eradication, India’s commentators called on a broad framework of ‘science’ to both diagnose and treat poverty. Yet, when we think of science in India today, this earlier priority of poverty eradication is hard to find. Poverty eradication as a goal in itself seems to have fallen off India’s scientific agenda. What accounts for this? Has the problem of poverty in India been solved? Or has it become an inconvenient subject alongside the new narratives that frame India as a site of remarkable economic growth? Seeking answers to these questions, the essays in this volume take a distinctive approach to the politics of health in modern India. Insisting that the commodification of health and medicine is fundamentally about economies of bodies, yet irreducible to conventional economic frameworks, the essays pursue the questions of who wins and who loses in India’s health economies. As this problematic transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries, the essays cut across studies of development and demography, research laboratories, and the rural and urban poor, combining the methodologies of anthropologists, sociologists, health economists, science studies and public health scholars, and historians.

Focussing on patterns of intergenerational stability, this book traces the unequal structures of opportunity in India. The author addresses questions and approaches towards social mobility (or the lack thereof) through interactions between social class, caste, and gender while adopting a rural–urban perspective, capturing changes over time, and the implications of social mobility on a national scale. This book plugs in crucial gaps in the research on social mobility, which has been marked by the lack of precision regarding the extent of mobility in contemporary India. Using a broad lens of both caste and class, this up-to-date statistical analysis, which uses national-level datasets and advanced quantitative methods, enriches the sociological as well as the anthropological literature, while also locating India within the larger context of social mobility research in the industrialized and industrializing world.