This paper offers gendered accounts of girls' schooling and childhood from urban India. It challenges global 'girl effect' narratives by grappling with the interplay of poverty and caste patriarchy and how it shapes families' struggles and concerns and girls' (re)productive labour, (un)freedoms and classroom experiences. Moving beyond the notion of 'multiple childhoods' it develops a conceptual framework that accounts for the way the state, the market, economic inequalities and local patriarchies inscribe poor girls' schooling and work. Drawing upon ethnographic work with Class VIII students in a state school it also unpacks girls' negotiation of classed and casted patriarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
This paper highlights the consequences of the economic and educational change among the Dalits of Karavadi. The tobacco cultivation that engages a large amount of labour has attracted the left political parties for the spread of their ideology and recruitment of party workers. It has helped in working against the practice of untouchability. Further, it has enabled the Dalits to be politically conscious and seriously participate in the political process. The growth of educational institutions in the village and the economic improvement have together helped the Dalits to assert their political and economic rights in the village. As a cumulative effect, the hegemonic inter-caste relations in the village have changed, though caste bias has not disappeared. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]