Nation-building In India Pdf

[Rubi Strycker]

Thetown of Winnebago interrupts the green and brown checkerboard landscape of northeastern Nebraska with a series of roads, homes, a hospital, and a school. Decades ago, the town and surrounding area, home to the Winnebago tribe of Nebraska, looked strikingly different.

Over the past three decades the tribe has managed to turn around its own fortunes through diverse, tribe-owned businesses. Morgan said tribal sovereignty was a cornerstone of the effort, as it was critical that the Winnebago be free to make necessary decisions about their future.

The turnaround has been followed closely by the HKS Project on Indigenous Governance and Development. This week, Kennedy School Dean Douglas Elmendorf announced that the project, formerly known as the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, received more than $15 million in the form of multiple transformational gifts to expand its long-running efforts to research, document, and share examples of effective tribal self-governance like that of the Winnebago.

The project was founded in 1987 by Joseph Kalt, the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy emeritus, and Professor Stephen Cornell (now at the University of Arizona) largely to answer this question: How have some tribes successfully strengthened their economies, cultures, and governance where others have fallen short?

As the sovereignty and nation-building renaissance took hold throughout Indian country, the Harvard project helped chart the course forward for many tribal leaders by documenting exemplars of excellence in tribal self-governance and providing actionable resources for and guidance on everything from tribal constitutional reform to best practices in tribally managed education reform.

With continuing losses on the market, the cancelation of the share sale and moves by foreign investors to clarify the extent of their exposure to Adani, it seems clear that the controversy is not going away as quickly as some predicted or hoped.

The Adani controversy is spectacular. But there is a real danger, if we address it as a question of alleged financial malpractice, that we miss the real issue. This is well brought out by the op-ed by Mihir Sharma:

Challenging prevailing narratives, Mody contends that successive post-independence leaders, starting with its first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, failed to confront India's true economic problems, seeking easy solutions instead. As a popular frustration grew, and corruption in politics became pervasive, India's economic growth relied increasingly on unregulated finance and environmentally destructive construction. The rise of a violent Hindutva has buried all prior norms in civic life and public accountability.

Mody does not deny the growth, which in recent decades has lifted hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty. But he also highlights mounting inequality, which now places India alongside South Africa and Brazil as one of the most unequal societies on earth;

For an uninhibited celebration of digital infrastructure as a mechanism for incorporating hundreds of millions of people, both into the governmental machinery of the Indian state and a national market, see Raghavan et al 2019. The graphic below rather nicely illustrates the way in which technology maps onto a caricatured sociology of 21st-century India. A society split three ways between (1) fully empowered smart phone users, (2) families in more traditional clothing accessing services on simpler cell phones and (3) elderly village dwellers whose access is enabled indirectly by way of Aadhar-tied merchant pay terminals in every village across India.

For a more critical take, locating the Aadhaar system in the history of the Indian state, check out this piece by Kavita Dattani also from 2019. The abstract does a good job of explaining what is at stake.

To anyone who has to deal regularly with the antiquated pre-digital processes of governance in either the United States or many parts of Europe, the degree of digitization in India often beggars belief.

It adds up to an impressive and coherence vision of change. Comprehensive digitization, fed by an encompassing national grid, powered by national renewable energy generation - this is nation-building for real. And it matters all the more in a society in which, as Elizabeth Chatterjee has shown us, electricity has long been seen as an integral part of the national welfare state and the project of nation-building.

I was delighted that The Wire saw fit to pick up and republish Chartbook #190. I\u2019ve long harbored a secret ambition to join the ranks of the Wire-wallahs. Cam and I also featured the Adani story on the Pod this week.

\u2026 talk of cronyism misses the point. If Adani didn\u2019t exist, the Indian government would have had to invent him: The development model we have now chosen requires risk-taking \u201Cnational champions\u201D such as the Adani Group. \u2026 Much of what Hindenburg put in its report doesn\u2019t count as news for Indian investors. They have known for years that Adani Enterprises Ltd., the fulcrum of the Adani empire, is loaded down with debt, and that the ultimate source of its funding is remarkably opaque. Adani stock is generally thinly traded; few here will be willing to believe that Adani companies set out to defraud retail investors, even if both public sector banks and state-owned insurers have bet heavily on them. No, Indians\u2019 real fear is something else \u2014 that Gautam Adani and his companies simply cannot do what they say they will. Can they build the roads they have promised, improve the ports they have been given, maintain the airports they won in a bid? Until now, nobody else has been able to do so.

You don\u2019t have to agree with Sharma\u2019s critique of \u201Cold-fashioned industrial policy\u201D, to see the force of his point. What is really at stake here is not the purity of financial markets, but a model of economic development. Who, if anyone, can get things done?

On the massive reach of the \u201CTwo As\u201D (The Adani and Ambani conglomerates) and their implications for India\u2019s political economy, Arvind Subramian is, as usual, enlightening). Here a talk with The Wire about India\u2019s growth prospects.

For deeper historical perspective on India\u2019s growth outlook, you may wish to pick up Ashoka Mody\u2019s typically fiery interpretation of India\u2019s economic development since independence, which is being released by Stanford University Press this month.

Compiling a list of critical voices like this, you can easily come across as though you don\u2019t appreciate the dramatic transformation in material circumstances which India and Indians have achieved since the 1980s. In fact, a critical perspective on contemporary India and its politics acquires even more force if you reckon with the reality of spectacular change.

In many of the ex-colonies of European empires, biometric technology systems are being built under an ethos of welfare and financial service delivery. One case in this broader trend of postcolonial governance is India's Aadhaar and India Stack. This paper uses this case to explore how the in-sourcing of technology into means of governing, behind a front of participatory \u201Cgood governance,\u201D is contributing to the historical trajectory of citizenship regimes in India. Through claims of reducing financial \u201Cleakages,\u201D Aadhaar, a biometric identification database consisting of fingerprint, iris scan, and photograph, has become compulsory for accessing welfare in India. The Indian government makes a case for Aadhaar using a propaganda discourse of its success, based on weak evidence. The India Stack, a set of cloud-based application programming interfaces (APIs) built on top of the Aadhaar database, offers a digital infrastructure for private companies to verify identities using Aadhaar data and to offer other \u201Cservices\u201D including \u201Cfinancial services.\u201D The ability to access data, paired with a \u201Crevolving door\u201D of individuals between state and corporations, points to an ulterior goal of both Aadhaar and the India Stack: creating winners in the corporate and financial technology sectors. The Indian corporate-state run through a \u201Cgoverntrepreneurism\u201D uses Aadhaar and the India Stack as new digital technologies of governmentality to transform populations into subjects or customers.

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