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This paper considers the distribution of mortality across social groups classified by caste, gender and sector of origin in India in the mid-2010s: as such, the essay is intended to be both a methodological/measurement-oriented study and a substantive empirical assessment of an important dimension of human functioning in India. The analysis is carried out employing micro-data on the age-distributions of population and death-rates available in the National Family Health Survey of 2015–16 (NFHS-4). Mortality in the paper is measured in terms of the crude death rate, an indicator of "inefficiency" in the age-distribution of deaths, and an "age-adjusted" death rate which takes account of both the mean and the dispersion of a distribution. The last-mentioned indicator is taken to be the preferred measure of mortality. The analysis in the paper suggests that mortality outcomes across castes replicate the caste hierarchy and that there is a sharp rural-urban divide in the distribution of death. Mortality sex-ratios are found to be relatively more favourable for the lower than the higher castes. The results presented in the paper are not unexpected, but they provide quantitative confirmation of one's worst suspicions regarding the skewed distribution of mortality across social groups in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poor people in India routinely have to wait for short-term employment, basic services and subsidized goods. Based on fieldwork in Delhi, this paper describes how this waiting blends into an environment where men are underemployed and women try to make ends meet by engaging in contentious public activities. While negotiating destabilized gender roles, the latter downplay their wait for services and describe much of their paid and unpaid work as 'mere' waiting and just 'passing time'. In complex responses, they sometimes internalize the relations of power that keep them waiting, while subverting them on other occasions. Exploring what these women hide or minimize brings to light a host of activities that question our understanding of the boundaries of labour, idleness and the broader work of social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between conflict trajectories and years of schooling in India for girls and boys. It adopts propensity score matching methods on panel data from the India Human Development Survey (2004/05-2011/12) merged with conflict data from the South Asia Terrorism Portal. Conflict is measured according to the dynamic trajectory of Naxal violence-related fatalities at the district level, distinguishing areas of chronic conflict with those experiencing dynamism in conflict intensity over time. ATT estimates indicate that conflict is associated with a reduction in years of schooling for both genders, though relatively high for girls (by a quarter of a year for girls and by 0.16 of a year for boys), driven by large reductions in school accumulation for girls living in areas of chronic conflict. Results are consistent when adopting different methods, alternative measures of conflict fatalities, and accounting for other conflicts and selective migration. Examining transmission mechanisms suggest that household spending on girls' education may be de-prioritised amidst conflict, while conflict may also weaken or destroy school infrastructure. Results suggest that policy responses should prioritise girls' education in areas of chronic conflict, not only in 'fragile states' but in countries where conflict remains a subnational concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There appears to be a globally unifying discourse that suggests Muslim communities are not supportive of girls' education12. This paper aims to destabilize such a discourse by inserting the narratives of Muslim parents pursuing girls' education in Assam's Nagaon district. By paying attention to the concepts of bhal suwali (good girlhood) and bhal ghor (good family) articulated by parents in my study, this paper connects the performances of certain types of gender practices with the pursuit of class aspirations. It shows that good girlhood works as symbolic capital that helps Muslim parents to culturally authorize their daughters as legitimate actors in the field of education, while legitimizing themselves as good family. This paper draws attention to three practices of respectable femininity through which good girlhoods are enacted in the field of education, namely: negotiating poverty respectably, prioritizing gendered discipline, and merging career aspirations with marital prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that the mother's association with the child's schooling and educational needs is not just limited and peculiar to the middle-class families, as the literature suggests, but it is increasingly true of poor and working-class families too. This paper discusses how mothers from a poor neighbourhood in India straddle between household work, paid employment and children's education and how they envisage and support their children's schooling, at times going against the general tide to ensure a better life for their children. Other than highlighting the gendered nature of support for children's education, this paper, also outlines the nature of the differences and distinctions among mothers from a poor neighbourhood in terms of the family social status and educational levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the intimate labour of corporate cleaners in India. Their intimate labour involves removing the bodily waste of others, as well as working on their own bodies to meet employer demands. These workers are situated within India's lavish corporate offices which serve as prominent symbols of development. Yet toilet cleaning continues to be embedded within histories of gender, caste, and class hierarchies in India. Based on original field research in Pune, India, we explore the experiences of the workers who perform corporate cleaning jobs that allow round the clock operation of multinational technology industries. We argue that while corporate cleaning is sanitized, professionalized, and mirrors the neoliberal visions of a global India, it is complicit in a denial and entrenchment of caste and gender hierarchies. Our analysis contributes to debates around gendering of intimate labour by exploring its salience as well as invisibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the inheritance rights of transgender persons in India. It examines the legal framework for inheritance and provides an overview of all court decisions between 1950 and 2021 that mention the term transgender (and its analogous terms, i.e., aravani, kinner, etc.). Though the Indian Constitution bars discrimination based on sex or gender, inheritance laws do not envisage transgender persons or a change in gender identity. They are based on a binary notion of gender. individuals must choose between conforming to their assigned gender or not availing their rights. Moreover, successors are often difficult to identify as individuals may lack documentation, could not marry, or cannot prove adoption. While courts attempt to address these challenges, they leave it to their subjective satisfaction on when to secure the rights of transgender persons. These are important issues that must be addressed through changes in the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debt bondage is one of the most widespread forms of unfree labour today. The majority of the existing studies focuses on bonded labourers as a homogenous group rather than examining group dynamics within the population of bonded labourers. This paper tries to overcome these limitations and examines experiences of women bonded labourers from the Sahariya tribe in India. It argues that gendered norms intersect with other patterns of structural violence creating a situation where women are doubly exploited but also opening new (limited) agentic spaces for these women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the prevalence of child labour and long working hours in India using 2019 data, with estimates for boys and girls that deal with age-related child development concerns related to long hours of work. We use international suggestions to define harmful child labour from ILO and UNICEF and a nationally defined time-threshold model in analysing the child-labour phenomenon. Measuring time by the three measurement systems and splitting children by age, gender, and cultural components make harmful forms of labour become clearer. The results show that girls doing agricultural labour and boys working as non-agricultural labourers had the longest average working hours in India. Important social-group differentials emerge. This study implies that policy-makers can be, and need to be, aware of explicit measures of hours worked by children aged six to 17. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue covers an intersectional approach to extreme labour exploitation. We provide concrete empirical studies and new theoretical frameworks. This overview paper analyses how modern slavery theories might influence policy options. The theories examined in this Special Issue include supply-chain theories, feminist approaches to work, diffusion of innovation theory, intersectional gender-and-development theory, and the social construction of narratives around bonded and forced labour. Evidence is given from the garment industry, farming, and other sectors based on field research and questionnaire surveys dated 2015–2020. Women in paid jobs are widely exposed to extreme exploitation, coerced overtime, having their papers held by the employer, and subject to threats/violence. In care work, the gender worktime difference is large, and evidence is given from India of girl children's work hours being much longer, on average, than boys' hours. Extreme exploitation rests upon gaping social and economic inequalities which deserve policy attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does a legal change in women's inheritance rights have long-term effects on child health outcomes? This paper examines the effect of an improvement in women's inheritance rights on child nutritional health outcomes in India using a difference-in-differences estimation approach. We use the staggered implementation of the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 to investigate the impact of the reform on anthropometric indictors of child health: being underweight, stunted, and wasted. The findings of this study reveal that an improvement in women's inheritance rights has a positive impact on children's health and reduces the probability of nutritional deficiency in the child. We identify mechanisms such as increased educational levels, better marital outcomes, and improved intrahousehold bargaining power of women as potential pathways through which inheritance rights affect child nutritional health outcomes. The results of the paper lend credence to growing evidence that legal recognition of women's inheritance rights can have sustained and second-generation effects, in spite of poor enforcement mechanisms and persistence of deep-rooted societal bias against women holding property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the expansion in schooling infrastructure of girls as part of India's Education for All program has increased female literacy and reduced gender gaps. To identify causal effects, I exploit the variation according to the targeting scheme of the programme which involved classifying subdistricts as either educationally backward or not. Using a regression discontinuity method, I find significant expansion in the number of girls' schools and residential schools for girls, but no significant positive effect on either female literacy or the gender literacy gap. Cost-effective methods other than an untargeted, large-scale infrastructure programme should be explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Rising numbers of young unmarried men in India reflect a marriage squeeze that goes beyond the shortage of brides created by sex-selective abortion. We describe a decline in men's marriageability caused by their falling economic prospects at the same time as families of brides are increasingly seeking grooms with stable employment. We group young men into those without jobs or much education, those with education but no work, and the privileged few with education as well as employment. This classification resolves some of the seeming contradictions in the qualitative literature on marriage in India. Some of this literature talks about the rising prevalence of bride price and some about the persistence of dowry, while some papers reflect in general on the costs of being young, male, and aimless. Our commentary includes a review of the growing literature on the physiological and (perhaps) consequently behavioural and health outcomes of men's anomie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dams are the biggest 'development' displacement agent. In this paper, we explore the gendered processes and structures of dam-induced displacement and resettlement on Indigenous communities and how displaced men conceptualise masculinities and gender relations within those communities. Drawing upon results of previous research undertaken in India and Malaysia, these two disparate cases allow us to examine how displacement affected men and changed their lives, and subsequently how they (re)constructed and (re)negotiated masculinities and gender-social relations in post-resettlement lives. We highlight two critical issues, namely, household and community land/resources, and compensation and rehabilitation processes to illustrate how gender roles, and in particular masculinities and men's roles, were transformed in dam displacement in both the countries, and analyse the consequences for women, family life and gender relations. We argue that the outcomes of gender and social asymmetries have largely depended on the realities of power, allowing men to reconstruct their masculinities to retain stereotyped notions of male superiority and female subordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines discourses about sexual risk and respectability in the South Indian city of Chennai, through an ethnographic study of young women's participation in practices of public sex. Focusing on middle-class women located at the heart of neoliberal and national fantasies of the 'good life', it makes two arguments. First: the paper unpacks the ways in which urban publics have been stigmatised as 'unsafe' for respectable women. It demonstrates that in practices of publicly-located sex, young women subvert this. They instead see private and commercial spaces – which have been celebrated as the locus of their liberation – as places of surveillance and discipline. Second: the paper interrogates how spatial governmentalities produce regimes of legitimacy that accrue to particular sexual acts. It argues that what 'counts' as sex is also determined geographically: by where the sex act occurs and what geographies of discipline and imaginaries of risk and respectability it evokes in its location. Both arguments draw attention to the ways in which contemporary discourses about the 'risk' of urban publics evoke the logics of development within which the construct of respectable femininity is located. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the movement of "item numbers" from mainstream Bollywood culture to the regional culture of Assam. Given the level of eroticism that is part of such songs, the paper will specifically explore the means of surveillance and control that these "non-normative" cultural texts are subjected to within a local spatial context. By deconstructing this inter-cultural movement of performance, the paper attempts to reveal whether and how cultural appropriation of the "mainstream" by the "periphery" functions to keep the power dynamics of gender and national/sub-national identities intact. Based on visual methodology and textual analysis of Assamese item songs and cringe pop songs, the paper will theorize the regulation of bodies in these spaces. Understanding the renewed relationship between music and bodies in a new context will situate the gendered nature of body-space politics through item numbers. While, on the one hand, the dancing body has the capability to subvert gender norms, on the other hand, the same dancing body is often controlled through hyper-nationalist imaginations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and research are globally recognised as engines of growth and development and indicators of citizens' well-being. Studies have continuously highlighted the unequal access and participation in STEM higher education based on class, caste, gender, disability and other markers of identity. This research paper investigates the underrepresentation of women in STEM at the Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs) in India. IITs are India's top elite institutions that open window of opportunities to students across the world. The study uses the data available from the All India Survey of Higher Education (AISHE), the Council of Indian Institute of Technology and the websites of the IITs. The findings indicate a significant gap between males and females in faculty positions at IITs. Furthermore, the study finds that the underrepresentation of women faculty differs across the STEM disciplines at IITs in India. It needs more gender-just affirmative action policies such as intersectional reservation for women in STEM academic careers, funding, legal protection against harassment, and representation of women in various committees and leadership positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waste is the visible outcome of socioeconomic processes such as urbanisation and industrialisation. Yet the negative impacts of waste mismanagement are often externalised and invisibilised in the metabolism of cities, in which informal waste labourers often assume the heaviest burden. In this paper, we approach cities as sociocultural arenas in which agents work within and around structural constraints to allow transformation to take place. Our paper analyses how grassroots activism, NGO-municipality collaboration, and women's empowerment led to realising transformative potential for both solid waste management and social inclusion in the Indian city of Pune. We analyse the case of SWaCH Pune Seva Sahakari Sanstha (SWaCH), a predominantly-female social cooperative of waste pickers, to show how supporting and enhancing informal labour can produce multiple positive outcomes. Our analysis also examines the role that the women waste pickers themselves played in bringing about change. We consider the structural constraints for achieving deeper and broader impact and assess what these indicate for the long-term success of this initiative. We also illustrate how power structures tend to constrain bottom-up transformation approaches, regardless of their transformative potential. Above all, SWaCH's story shows how working with informality rather than seeking to eradicate it can result favourably in moving towards the legitimisation and gradual institutionalisation of a pro-poor urban solid waste management system in which women's empowerment is expressed not only for their benefit but also for the states, the citizens and the environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we ask: why do people in rural agrarian communities facing increasing migration pressures from changing climatic conditions, stay? We aim to understand why people stay, who stays, what are the impacts of migration on those who stay, and what are their needs for adaptation? We study a population of people who do not migrate from Himalayan communities of Uttarakhand, India, despite their livelihoods being already severely disrupted by climate change climate change and high outmigration has led to abandoned so-called 'ghost villages'. Semi-structured interviews (n = 72) were held with affected communities, experts, and policymakers. Results show that motivations for immobility are shaped by place attachment; place-based resource advantages; social milieu; dependence on subsistence agriculture and gender roles. We find that immobility experiences are differentiated by gender, age and in situ resources. Those who stay are negatively impacted by migration via loss of labour in agriculture, changes in population size and composition, loss of community, in addition to the negative impacts of climate change. Our results are likely relevant on a global scale, to other subsistence smallholder communities who stay despite increasing climate risks. These populations will need gender-sensitive support to adapt in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses whether living in a locality with high crime against women affects the probability of early marriage—that is, marriage before the legal age of marriage of girls. Using a nationally representative longitudinal data set and tackling the potential endogeneity of local crime rates, we find that perceived crime against women in the locality significantly increases the likelihood of early marriage of girls, while there is no such effect on boys of comparable age group. We also find no such effect of gender-neutral crimes (such as theft and robbery) on the likelihood of early marriage of girls. Moreover, we find that the relationship holds only in conservative households where the purdah system is practised, and also in the northern region of India, where patriarchal culture and gender norms are stronger than in the southern region. A sensitivity analysis assessing the potential impact of unobservable confounders suggests that our estimates are unlikely to be affected by omitted variable bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the food security implications of the out-migration of men for rural households headed by women. Recent transformations in the socio-economic landscape of the Global South involve an increasing number of rural households shifting towards urban-nonfarm, migration-based livelihoods. In many rural societies, social and cultural norms restricting women's mobility means migration is usually undertaken by men, leading to a phenomenon of left-behind women. The absence of men requires women to assume the role of household heads. This often triggers fundamental changes in intrahousehold gender power relations. However, little is known about the effects of these changes on household food security outcomes. Drawing on primary field research in western Bihar in India, this article attempts to highlight interconnections between migration, women left behind and household food security and, in doing so, makes two key contributions. First, with a focus on gender social roles, the paper shows that the two oft-cited impacts of migration of men—'improved autonomy' and 'increased responsibility' for left-behind women—provide conceptual pathways to understand migration-gender-food security linkages. Second, it provides evidence on how changes in women's roles under conditions of such migration intersect with household food security. The findings indicate a gender-based disadvantage in food security outcomes faced by household headed by women, offsetting even the potentially positive influence of improved female autonomy. The paper argues for the need to address socio-economic mechanisms underpinning gender-based vulnerabilities to food security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rohingya experiences of displacement and refuge are heavily gendered. Sexual and gender-based violence have been used as weapons against Rohingya women, men, girls and boys in Myanmar for decades. Trafficking and exploitation are rife on the flight out of the country, and host states such as India present their own gendered challenges to family survival and individual coping. In this paper, we examine how some of those violent and disruptive experiences have affected gender roles for individuals and families as they have fled Myanmar (often more than once) and sought refuge in India via Bangladesh. We present new insight into the dynamic subjectivity of Rohingya women as we show how, contrary to dominant depictions of passive victimhood, many have lead family migration across borders, taken up NGO/community leadership roles, or made the best 'home' possible within the limitations of the host context. This is because personal and family agency is sensitive to transitional opportunities and threats—i.e., gender norms of home and host contexts, interactions with host communities, and trust relations with NGOs, to name a few. Crucially, these social practices and experiences are not static or linear; they span generations and sprawling geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the digital revolution in the 21st century, the Information Technology (I.T.) industry in India has emerged with significant gendered trends and has created new knowledge and spaces to evolve culturally. As a natural corollary, gender rearrangements in the Indian social fabric and within the Indian I.T. industries over the decade have been reformed. Not surprisingly, such rearrangements have impacted gender constructions and social transitions in India but, in spite of new realignments, are quite at play and where symbolic capital negotiate and navigate a myriad of gender relations across multiple geo-social axes of differentiation. To complicate, since the early 2000s, a new paradigm in social sciences, popularly known as Mobility Studies, emerged and which reflects a new approach to gender's social interplay. Mobility Studies travels the continuum from the individual to the institutional, establishing new dynamics not only with intimate spheres such as the family but also within the community and society. Premised on the above, this paper brings in new insights on how individuals and inequalities are reconstructed through their mobility (or lack of it), by bringing in significant conversations between intersectionality and mobility studies, and by examining multiple connections, primarily focusing on the Indian I.T. industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactive service work in various middle- and upper-class settings has created visible disparities between those who seek the work and those who provide it. In addition to beauty work, beauty parlours require emotional/affective work, widening the class gap between sellers and consumers by requiring further labour on the part of the worker. However, within the smaller beauty parlours existing in the by-lanes of larger Indian markets, there is the possibility of creating shared space through conversations and care through a mobilisation of 'auntyness'. In this paper, I explore how the conversations in a New Delhi beauty parlour lead to the creation of aunties that challenges the limits of interactive service work and enables temporary communities of kinship and care that hinge upon the participants' performances of the styles, affects and values associated with aunties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postmodern anthropology has used the claims of reflexivity, inter-subjectivity and recognition of differences in individual experiences in its attempt to unsettle the authority of traditional anthropology. This has led anthropologists to assert that ethnography is a cultural construct, whereby 'fieldwork' is conceptualised as 'embodied spatial practice'. Drawing on village studies from India, this paper argues that the recognition of different embodied practices of ethnographers from diverse social locations has not necessarily led to the democratisation of the discipline. Conversely, insufficient engagement with hierarchical, overlapping power relations within the ethnographic field, as well as within the disciplinary establishment, has led to the standardisation of disciplinary articulations of research ethics, the terms of which privilege hegemonic groups within the discipline. The articulation of the concerns of scholars from marginalised social groups often remains difficult within such disciplinary frameworks. This paper argues that establishing a critical tradition in ethnography in the true sense requires the postmodern sensibility of recognition of the differences in experiences, supplemented with feminist and subaltern critical interrogations of power and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores gender-affirmative technologies in the contemporary Indian context, drawing on the findings of a qualitative study of medical practice across four Indian cities and an analysis of state documents. It examines terminological protocols and therapeutic crafting as aspects of human technologies that mobilize affects of distress and aspiration to facilitate belongingness to the universalized identity 'transgender', a crafting that also enacts an absorption of the hijra figure into the universal category transwoman. It links these technologies to community-building, emergence of behavioural categories and management of bodies and risk developing from the 1990s to the present in India. It explores the medical assemblage, including institutionalized healthcare and extended sites of expert authority, proposing a shift in reading of discrimination as strategies of containment and relocation of self-determination within state language and the clinic today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schoolchildren's embodied subjectivity has often been understood as a bio-political tool to 'clean up' and modernize poor and marginalized communities. In many post-colonial contexts, school uniforms frequently appear as visual symbols of a child's clean, schooled body and democratic access to education. Through ethnographic research with 10–14-year-old schoolchildren in urbanizing areas in northern Tamil Nadu, my paper asks how children inhabit and co-construct the school uniform code's cleanliness discourse in their everyday lives. Studying plural school uniforms through a spatial lens, I explore schoolchildren's embodied and relational work in negotiating with the equalizing school uniform codes within the schools and the circulation of multiple school uniforms in the community outside. Engaging with a shifting visual aesthetic of embodied cleanliness in a context of class segregated schooling. I argue that school uniforms are discursive sites where exclusions of class and gender, with undertones of caste and age, are simultaneously reinforced and negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of service and submission in Mughal India was starkly different from modern times. The rhetoric of complete submission to the person of the Emperor guided the social relations of all orders. A reflection of this must have been experienced at the level of the household service gentry. Important elements in this service class were chelas (freed male slaves), sahelis (freed slave-girls) and khwajasaras (eunuchs). All three sections had an ambiguous placement in the social order. The chelas and sahelis were in principle free but their social realities and the nature of their services were similar to that of slaves. Eunuchs, on the other hand, provided widely varied services, ranging from administrative duties to mere harem attendance. The conditions of all these groups depended largely on the interactions between them and their immediate masters. The paper explores the dynamics of the varying nature of social realities and mobility experienced by these different sections, locating them within class and gender contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a larger doctoral study about Critical Sexuality Education with children in Delhi, India. It puts forth alternate research and pedagogic interventions, inspired by the 'real' world, to engage children on ideas about sexuality beyond the biological. After presenting a brief overview of political debates and state programmes about sex/uality education in recent years in India, I go on to detail two examples of Participatory Research with girls at a Shelter Home for street children. These involve spatial mapping of their neighbourhood and interviewing a woman E-rickshaw driver. The children-researchers collaborated with the researcher-facilitator to pose questions about gender, violence, equity, access, social justice and so on, vis-à-vis their own lived experiences and social realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unfree labour has been central to the Indian tea industry's 'business model' since its establishment under British colonial rule. In this paper, we investigate forms of unfree labour in south Indian tea plantations based on a mixed methods study. Conceptualizing unfree labour in a multi-dimensional way our analysis brings to the fore how economic and social coercions that work on tea workers' desire to guarantee their household's daily and generational reproduction enable companies to control workers' time, that way facilitating profit making in the global tea industry. Gender ideologies and hierarchies normalize these coercions for women workers. They translate into gendered obstacles to exit plantation employment and lead to long working hours for low pay. At the same time, we show that the desire of women and men to secure their families' present and future livelihood also triggers and fuels unfree workers' resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent forest governance practices in India have responded to environmental change and subsequent livelihood insecurity by focusing resource governance policies on communities. A paradigm shift has occurred involving participatory inclusive bottom-up approaches, rather than state-centric, top-down forestry. With the formulation of the 1988 National Forest Policy, several variants of participatory models of forest governance – social forestry, community forestry, joint forest management – have been tried out, with differing degrees of success. The 2006 Forests Right Act adopts a rights-based approach to participatory forestry to address the serious concerns of environmental degradation, livelihood insecurity, tenure reforms and questions of autonomy and identity of forest-dependent communities. Using mainly qualitative methodology, this paper reviews forest governance policies and undertakes a critical examination of recent participatory forestry practices. Drawing empirical evidence from two community-based forest governance institutions in the state of Odisha in eastern India, the paper demonstrates how participatory forestry programmes, albeit successful, may be exclusionary with regard to women’s engagement in cases where their involvement is under-represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent developments in the evolution of 'labor history' as an academic field have injected new direction into theories of Gender, Sex and Bodies. Incidents of sexual violence and gender oppression have long been a brutal part of human history. In contemporary times, plantation societies are finally receiving critical attention as historians embark on gendered reappraisals of history, especially in countries like India. This article sets out to retrieve several accounts of sexual violence in the tea plantations of Assam during the colonial period. It also shows how the colonial masters (Sahibs) of the tea gardens have oppressed/sexualized the bodies of men/women workers in the tea gardens of Assam. An attempt is also made to reconstruct the forgotten stories of two tea-garden working-class women, Mangri Orang alias Malati Mem and Durgi Bhumij alias Durgi Mem, who were sexually abused by the European tea planters. From their objectification as sexualized bodies, the duo later showed their abilities of agency when they joined India's freedom struggle and transformed into freedom fighters. The paper analyzes the connections between oppressed/sexualized bodies of women tea plantation workers and the colonial capitalist patriarchy in the history of Assam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the key pathways linking agriculture and nutrition run through women's work, yet the evidence on these links are weak. Using time-use data from two Indian districts, this paper seeks to fill this gap. In principle, women's agricultural work could have positive and negative implications for nutrition, through increased control over incomes or intensifying work burdens. The emerging evidence points to the nuanced ways in which social identity, seasonality, and context mediate women's work in agriculture and consequently food intakes and feeding practices. Overall, women's work in agriculture seems to have a negative effect on household nutrition through two pathways: lack of adequate time for care work in peak agricultural seasons, and seasonal energy deficits that adversely affect their own health. Recognition of women's physical contributions to both agricultural production and domestic reproduction, and supporting them adequately, is central to improving nutritional outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary figurations of the 'the Indian Woman' over recent years have been heavily influenced by national and international media coverage focused on high profile, gruesome and brutal cases of rape and sexual assault of women in public. The suffering involved in such cases notwithstanding, we argue that investment in such representations runs the risk of limiting our understanding of the varied experiences of female bodies in public life. Most significantly, the bodies of younger girls and how they relate to public life is mostly assumed rather than studied. Drawing on a sub-sample of ethnographies of younger children aged 6–8 living in the city of Hyderabad, India and employing the phenomenological concept of 'orientation', the article explores young girls' everyday embodied orientation towards public life, with an intersectional framework. The paper considers three case studies from different spatial/cultural contexts and the empirical material is organised around the themes of the male gaze in a public space, orienting bodies in a schooled space, and the lived body in a domestic space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines gender differences in the long-term care of older parents in India by studying the expected provision of care by married sons and daughters. Gender differences in long-term care are important, as the sociocultural environment of India shapes the role of married children. While married sons are expected to provide long-term care for their biological parents, married daughters have limited scope to do so, a tendency that was revealed through our data from Osaka University's 'Preference Parameters in India, 2011.' Other family members are also expected to play a significant role in parental care, while neither gender expects their parents to rely on professional long-term care. This paper contributes to the scarce empirical evidence on long-term care for older parents by married children, as opposed to previous research that has focused on the division of caregiving activities between sons and daughters in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on moving workspaces into homes during and after the Covid-19-induced lockdown. In our qualitative research in India, we investigate the processes of place-making and redrawing of boundaries between paid and unpaid care work. Through interviews and autoethnographic reflections, we analyse the process of new workspace making. We examine the erasing of the home from the workspace where historical hierarchies of gender and caste mediated the (re) organising of work boundaries between paid knowledge and unpaid care work. The study is based in a context where social and physical infrastructure for paid knowledge work could not be assumed to be available in homes. The paper contributes to the literature on place-making with stories from a new context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The patriarchal kinship system in India considers sons as harbingers of prosperity and daughters as liabilities who require significant outlay of resources through their lifetimes. This social system assigns a higher value to sons and perpetuates discrimination in various forms. In this paper, instead of focusing on inferior outcomes for daughters, we provide empirical evidence of disproportionate penalties placed on long-term health outcomes of their parents. Using nationally representative data on health expenditure and outcomes for 2014, we find that a higher number of daughters are associated with increased probabilities of chronic ailment and self-reported poor health among the elderly. The effects are significantly weaker for scheduled tribes, a social group with relatively egalitarian gender norms. Also, these effects are stronger for higher quintiles of standardised number of daughters. Our findings remain robust to a variety of internal validity tests. In particular, we use a recent method that accounts for omitted variable bias to arrive at consistent estimates of bias adjusted treatment effects. Improved access to education and employment for daughters, adequate social protection and milestone-based conditional cash transfers are some ways to ameliorate this bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narratives on children's independent mobility (CIM) from developing countries remain limited and under-researched. This is the first paper from India that examines CIM across three urban neighbourhood typologies, taking a case of Kolkata. The study reports from the comparative analysis of the data provided by 384 parents of children aged 7–12 years from four schools on their CIM licence scores and neighbourhood perception. Logistic regression was employed to examine the association of CIM with the built environment (BE) and social environment (SE) variables of the neighbourhood. The results reveal that older children (10–12 years) were found to enjoy higher CIM licences irrespective of their gender. Low-rise neighbourhood inheriting an organic spatial growth fosters higher CIM than planned mid-rise or high-rise neighbourhoods. When all variables were taken together, the influence of neighbourhood social cohesion and safety on CIM was found to override the influence of BE variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the intergenerational effects following the positive changes in women's inheritance rights in India. Using the Indian Human Development Survey data for rural India and a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the property rights reform significantly empowered women through increased education. However, we find no intergenerational effect of the reform on children's education. We explore two potential mechanisms to explain these results: the role of status conflict among spouses and that of a child's birth-order and gender. Given that a woman's bargaining power may depend on her relative position to that of her husband, we investigate this channel and find a significant decrease in children's education in households where fathers are less educated than mothers. Accounting for a child's birth-order and gender, we find no evidence of son-preference through the education channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land ownership has long been argued to enhance farm productivity by improving tenure security. But would this hold for female and male owners alike? The relationship between land ownership and productivity has been investigated relatively little from a gender perspective in most regions, with work on Asia being especially sparse. Even less explored are gender differences in the likelihood of landowners self-cultivating as vs. leasing out their land. This paper uses a unique household-level dataset for nine states of India to first assess gender differences in the likelihood of landowners self-cultivating or renting out their land. It then analyses differences in farm productivity between female and male owners who self-cultivate. The effect of caste disadvantage is also explored. We find that women owners are significantly less likely than male owners to self-cultivate their land. This is linked especially to family labour constraints and regional opportunities. However, among those who do self-cultivate, the annual farm productivity per hectare does not differ significantly by the gender of the owner-cultivator. This holds true with or without controlling for other factors. Caste matters, however: Scheduled Caste owner-cultivators of both genders have significantly lower productivity than upper-caste ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper probes the historical and cultural-utopian rationale behind the wide acceptability of "Kiss of Love" (KoL) movement in India that sprang up during 2015 and assesses its theoretical significance as a heterotopic social movement. Heterotopia embodies tensions between place and non-place in public spaces. In the Indian context, streets have been places of extreme social segregation in terms of caste, gender and sexuality. Heterotopia does not mark "liberation" or "confinement," but produces sites porous with openings so that the possibilities of alternate lives remain open. In this reconstitution of public spaces for resistance, "a passion for improvisation" articulates acts of resistance in the mediated environments of post-civil society social movements that remain absorbent, always in flux, always contested and never predetermined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caste privilege is invisible in the lives of so-called upper caste, middle-class women. This paper offers critical insight into Brahman women's lives, mapping evolving gender roles but examining them as sites of caste privilege. Education, marriage and housework are the registers used to map gender roles. The study uses narratives of three generations of Chitpavan Brahman women and individual interviews of Chitpavan women from Pune, a city in western India. The findings confirm that accumulated cultural capital facilitates a smooth educational progression for Chitpavan women. The modernizing impulse of Brahmans necessitates a minimum social norm of educational attainment before marriage for women across generations. There is an increase in women's agency in marriage negotiations. Brahman women continue to be responsible for domestic management but can choose to identify as pragalbha grihini i.e. cultured housewives. I argue that the pragalbha grihini lies in a contested discursive space, between the tensions of 'feminist' and 'housewife'. It is an important pathway for the socio-cultural reproduction of caste privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While important foci of feminist legal jurisprudence have highlighted the patriarchal bias in the areas of legal theory, sexuality, race, and violence, an important area that has received little attention is the interface between health law, gender, and power, particularly in the context of post-colonial societies. This paper explores these concepts in contemporary India, the underlying idea being that health is as much an issue of violence as violence is an issue of health, and both carry critical implications for the gender power configurations in society. This discussion is framed in the interstices between the Indian state and the women's movement that have interfaced in fashioning law as a critical instrument of social change and women's empowerment. Several assumptions foreground this paper: Firstly, culture is the ground upon which gender and power dynamics play out in any society. Secondly, law is also taken to be one of the sites of cultural engagement and is very much embedded in and the product of prevailing values, norms, and practices; it is not outside culture. And lastly, although this paper is India-specific, it raises issues which have cross-national resonance, particularly in the South Asian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lives of young middle-class men in India are greatly different to their parents and older generations. As India economically liberalizes, there is a generational gap that has developed. Young men begin to start bridging this gap by living their lives through various negotiations and performances of appropriate masculinities in the contexts that surround them. Social developments in India mean that processes of consumption, urbanization and new practices of romantic and sexual expression have to be managed alongside older gendered expectations and responsibilities on young men. Through an ethnographic approach, this paper explores the social and cultural realities of young Indian men to understand how they are caught in-between and creatively manage their lives and relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work as a profession is committed to the creation of an equal and just society and thrusts its position on having a gender sensitive practicum. The current paper entails a discussion regarding the changing paradigms of gender within social work academic discourses as well as practice in India. It begins with a discourse on the sex/gender distinction as essential to feminist scholarship, and further talks about the inclusion of men and masculinities as well as the paradigm of tranfeminism in the current feminist discourse. Locating the holistic perspective in professional social work practice, it seeks to present few reflections on the contemporary field-based scenario of gender in social work practice at the grassroots in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a framework to examine the kinds of careers that rural disadvantaged youth would like to know about in a career guidance intervention as also related findings from two different rural disadvantaged contexts in India. Differences across gender, age group, region, and participation/non-participation in youth programmes are also explored. The results validate the importance of comprehensive career needs assessment and provide specific directions for designing and adapting career guidance interventions for rural disadvantaged youth. Implications for research and practice are discussed in general as well as for the specific contexts included in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent caste conflicts have revolved around discourses of honour, caste pride and shame. Although Dalit movements have been at the receiving end of the violence and have condemned the casteism underpinning it, they operate within a society in which questions of honour are highly significant. Dalit women activists are trapped in an unenviable position within the twin structures of caste and patriarchy, both of which speak to debates about group boundaries and honour. Taking the recent violence as its starting point, this paper draws on interviews with and observations of Dalit women in the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (Liberation Panther Party) in Tamil Nadu to chart how discourses of honour both facilitate and constrain their capacity to act. For all the party’s emphasis on women’s rights, women activists face an uphill struggle to secure recognition, respect and responsiveness both within the party as well as wider society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Concerns over social justice cannot be separated from concerns over the environment, and vice-versa. Gender in the climate change literature is predominantly vulnerability and adaptation centric, with a glaring gap in research on understanding the relationship between mitigation and gender justice. Building on the insights from gender justice, environmental justice, and climate justice scholarship, this paper argues that mitigation policy should be conceived not only in terms of transition to a low carbon economy but also as an instrument for enhancing gender justice. To conceptualize such a mitigation policy, we propose a two-step approach, combining the works of Schlosberg, Fraser, and Sen. We argue that, to start with, it is important to identify relevant forms of exclusion, and then, in turn, to identify opportunities for 'parity of participation' of women in the mitigation policy cycle. This must be supplemented with identification of, and efforts at, building long-lasting supporting capabilities. Application of the proposed approach is illustrated through three examples from India: the National REDD+ Strategy, the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojna (PMUY) for cleaner fuels, and the International Solar Training Programme (Solar Mamas). We illustrate how the Solar Mamas scheme is closer to the proposed two-step approach and hence better integrates mitigation and gender justice objectives, whereas the REDD+ and the PMUY need revisiting with additional provisions and reconceptualization. The paper suggests that mainstreaming of gender justice into implementation of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement is a promising new field of research. Key policy insights Failure to consider gendered barriers to meaningful participation of women may limit the effectiveness of even women-centric mitigation policies in achieving their stated objectives. It is possible to at least nudge the social drivers of gender injustice by identifying and creating opportunities for addressing the androcentric foundations of exclusion and marginalization of women. Mitigation policies offer unique opportunities to go beyond highlighting the structures of gender injustices embedded in socio-economic systems to break the stereotypes of gendered-roles by recognizing women as key stakeholders and claimants in the new low-carbon society. This would require reconceptualizing capacity building for mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine representations of nation and gender in newspaper coverage of the murder of a prominent Indian journalist, Gauri Lankesh, in September 2017. Using a transnational feminist and postcolonial lens, I analyze different portrayals of her murder by juxtaposing newspaper articles by major U.S and Indian English-language newspapers. My analysis reveals that both media articles circulate representations reminiscent of transnational discourses that rationalize political projects in the name of saving women or, in this case, saving journalists. My analysis shows, on the one hand, U.S. depictions present a linear progress narrative portraying India's democracy as failing and inefficient. In addition, these accounts employ rescue narratives of Indian democracy and journalists. On the other hand, my analysis also reveals that liberal Indian media depict Lankesh as a martyr killed in the struggle against Hindutva nationalism. I examine how a vernacular press journalist like Gauri Lankesh could become a martyr for English-speaking intellectual liberals and the English-language media. While both media present different narratives of the murder and its aftermath, they both downplay its gendered implications. Using the case of Lankesh, I raise questions about the effect of such coverage on women journalists today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]