Abstract
Despite three decades of rapid development, reduction in absolute poverty and progress in basic development indicators, India still accounts for about 28 per cent of the 1.3 billion multidimensional poor in the world. To make matters worse, India is also host to the world’s fastest growing inequality of income and access to health and education. This growing inequality is now showing up in a restlessness across urban areas, along with a churn in the work participation rates.
Inequality is one of the reasons a large number of countries are not functioning today as they are supposed to despite unprecedented progress against poverty, hunger and disease, the UN Human Development Report 2019 (UNDP, 2019) has said. This inequality has forced people to take to the streets in mass protests resulting in violence and political instability across several countries such as Hong Kong, Chile, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Bolivia and Venezuela.
Inequalities around education, and technology and climate change are widening, possibly leading to ‘a new great divergence’ in society at a scale unseen since the industrial revolution, the report highlights. In this context, it is important to understand the calls for abandonment of development strategies based on fossil-fuelled industrialisation and urban-centred economic growth. This issue of the journal looks into the nexus among development, ecology and climate change, and offers a theoretical and conceptual framework to explore significant patterns of community resistance evolving into promising strategies of reactions ‘from below’ against growth-driven development implicating ecocide. The resistance poses new challenges for the political systems in place as it rejects the dominant obsession with excessive growth at regional and global levels.
The second article in this issue delves into the concepts of participation and empowerment and if the latter can be achieved through the former. It offers a critical review of theoretical promises of participation and contrasts this with a number of real world examples. The article also highlights how participation can be used for validating external approaches and incorporated in social as well as community development projects to make it more cost-effective.
Education and health are sectors critical for growth of human capital. The third article seeks to address the issue of whether government health spending improves health outcomes. Using data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database, it examines the effect of public health expenditure on infant mortality, a proxy of health outcomes, in low-and middle-income countries.
India adopted a comprehensive multistage value-added tax (VAT) system, the Goods and Services Tax (GST), in 2017 that encompasses various taxes from union and state indirect tax bases. A dual VAT system with concurrent taxation power to the central and state governments, it aims to remove the cascading of taxes and enshrine a destination-based consumption tax system that will encourage investment and ease of doing business in India. The fourth article explores possible causes of the current revenue shortfall in GST collection, and assesses its impact on union and state finances.
The last article is an attempt to examine the trends of industrial R&D expenditure by India’s private and public sectors during the pre-reform and post-reform periods. Drawing on its analysis, the article argues that technological policy and industrial policy should be taken into consideration with respect to the demand and production processes. Since India is a low-income country with a massive agrarian and rural labour force, technological capabilities and organisation of industrialisation should be developed according to the indigenous and categorised necessities of both the public and the private sectors.