Socio-Economic Surveys of Three Villages in Tripura: A Study of Agrarian Relations, a book prepared by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies and published by Tulika Books in 2019, has recently been reviewed by the noted economist C. T. Kurien in Frontline magazine.
At a time when the economics of agriculture has been ousted from the economics curricula in India, it is heartening to see agrarian issues occupying a central position in recent books of fiction. In this blog, I review Kota Neelima’s Death of a Moneylender (2016, Penguin, Gurgaon).
Professor John Harriss of Simon Fraser University has reviewed How Do Small Farmers Fare? Evidence from Village Studies in India, a publication of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies, in the recent issue of Journal of Agrarian Change.
On March 6, 2018, a farmers’ protest march under the banner of the All Indian Kisan Sabha (AIKS) began from CBS Chowk in Nashik. The swelling sea of marching peasants and workers, wearing red caps and carrying red flags and banners, ended their 200 km march at the historic Azad Maidan in Mumbai in the early hours of March 12, 2018. The six-day march or the Long March, as the march came to be called, was watched on television screens across the country with growing admiration and support.
The sequencing of chapters and their content ensures that the book emerges as a coherent whole rather than a disjointed set of contributions, often a feature of edited books. The data it uses has been collected through a socio-economic census of 17 villages located in different agro-ecological zones in nine large states of India.
This volume is a very important contribution to development studies in India and other parts of South and Southeast Asia. The dynamics of agriculture remain a critical factor in the social progress of these countries, and this careful and detailed research will provide a basis for constructing more effective development policies in India and elsewhere.
Panchayats as geographical units for the aggregation, estimation, and publication of official statistics
The Life Project, a new book by Helen Pearson, describes the rich history of cohort studies in the United Kingdom.* These are longitudinal studies of individual lives starting from the time of birth and continuing over an extended period.
Madhura Swaminathan is Professor and Head, Economic Analysis Unit, Indian Statistical Institute Bangalore Centre. She is one the Trustees of the Foundation. Webpage
