The paper delineates the situation of the Scheduled Tribes in the background of various policies of the state during the successive plan periods and its impact on their socio-economic mobility. Politically, this community is the most voiceless in the state. Their unsecured livelihood position in...

Marx himself certainly thought that political economy was a subject of most urgent importance for a "theoretician of the revolutionary proletariat". Marx took over the orthodox theory of his day according to which an explanation of the relative prices of particular commodities was to be found in...

Are ostensibly demand-driven public programs less susceptible to political clientelism even when private goods are allocated? This is examined using expenditure data at the local level from India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

The overall goal of this paper is to analyse the political economy of food price policies in China during the global food crisis. The results show that given China’s unique economic and political context and the nature of its agricultural markets, the government’s reaction to the...

The contemporary approach to political economy is built around vested interests -- elites,  lobbies, and rent-seeking groups which get their way at the expense of the general public. The ...

This paper examines changes that have (and have not) occurred – at the village level in Karnataka where most or the state’s residents live, and at higher levels when they impinge upon villages – since 1972. Substantial changes have occurred on many (though certainly not all)...

This paper uses household data from India to examine the economic and social status of village politicians, and how individual and village characteristics a®ect politician behavior while in o±ce. Education increases the chances of selection to public o±ce and reduces the odds that a...

This paper develops a framework for thinking about the policy challenge of scaling up small scale interventions, governmental and non-governmental, that address poverty reduction successfully. The framework sees scaling up as addressing different components of market failure, government failure...

This paper uses political reservations for women in India to study the impact of women’s leadership on policy decisions. In 1998, one third of all leadership positions of Village Councils in West Bengal were randomly selected to be reserved for a woman: in these councils only women could...

This document is at the behest of KMVS and is an effort to hold up a mirror to their journey. It is a documentation of their history, context, evolution, and experiences since its emergence in 1989. Additionally, it is also an attempt to critically foreground and map out the conceptual...