Pre-colonial records indicate that opium cultivation in India was practised to meet both medicinal and recreational purposes. Its ability to produce short-lived mind-altering conditions is well known.1 Owing to the caste-mediated nature of the agrarian landscape, it was the koeri…
In his introductory essay to the volume on ethnographies of archaeological practice, Matt Edgeworth (2006, p. 7) points out how ‘the excavation site itself can be seen as only one of multiple sites\ (overlapping and occupying the same space) .…
‘The Left must have a programme to bake more bread before redistributing them. You have proved to be good at distribution. But you have no nprogramme for production.’ This was a common criticism of many liberals in the background of…
Use of chemical fertilisers has been key to agricultural growth in India since the 1970s. Widespread adoption of chemical fertilisers along with other modern inputs became possible because of specific policies that were introduced in the wake of the Green…
We must begin with an apology to our subscribers and readers. The Covid pandemic and the lockdown that followed affected Social Scientist’s production schedule. With offices closed and the press shut down, we had to postpone publication of the March–April…
The Draft National Education Policy (NEP) 2019 envisions an ‘India-centred education system that contributes directly to transforming our nation sustainably into an equitable and vibrant knowledge society.’ I would like to focus on knowledge economy, avowedly the central agenda of…
The Indian handloom industry is presently estimated to produce goods valued at around $108 billion. Nearly 27 lakh households across the country are employed in this sector. It is one of the major contributors to exports with a share of…
It has been 150 years since the publication of Karl Marx’s formidable work, Das Capital (Volume 1). This first volume provides a critical analysis of capitalist production and defines Marx’s crucial break with the classical political economy of Adam Smith…
Crisis in the crop production sector has been sufficiently explored at the state and sub-state level ever since its outbreak by the late 1990s in India. A common thread in the analysis of agrarian crisis is generalisation of its causes…
John Berger’s television series Ways of Seeing famously began with him setting a knife to Botticelli’s Venus and Mars. Flouting all rules of television performance, he stood with his back to the camera that instead faced the framed painting hung…