Journal of South Asian Development

It is widely recognized that corruption risks undermining state legitimacy, diminishing trust and reducing resources for reconstruction in the aftermath of war. This article aims to advance the understanding of corruption in post-war societies by examining how local experiences of corruption relate to ethnic and other divides in Sri Lanka, where a 26-year war was fought largely along ethnic lines. The article builds on 170 interviews carried out in 2009–2013, focusing on how ‘ordinary people’ perceive corruption and ethnic divides after the war. The article argues that ethnic grievances have less to do with local inter-ethnic relations than with relations between the state and minority groups. We find that state–citizen relations in the post-war period to a large extent have been shaped by practices and discourses of corruption. Although corrupt practices—or practices perceived to be corrupt—are prevalent in all parts of the country and affect all groups, they are often interpreted as instances of ethnic discrimination. However, it is not only ethnic identity that matters in relations between citizens and the (corrupt) state, but also socio-economic position, level of education, language skills, gender and social networks.

This article presents a political economy explanation for the dramatic decline in performance of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), India’s largest social welfare policy, in one of its highest performing states, Rajasthan. The sharp decline from 2009 to 2010 is shown to be counter-intuitive, given the active civil society engagement right from the early stages of the Act’s making and implementation. Using information from field visits, interviews and secondary literature, I unpack the reasons for this decline, evaluating the validity of demand-side shortfalls and supply-side constraints as explanations. I demonstrate that it is primarily low capacity and low motivation of state officials that have led to the drop in MGNREGA’s performance. Further, I argue that the biggest strengths of the MGNREGA, that is, demand-based nature and provisions around transparency, have been made its most pressing shortcomings. Given the political nature of implementation of the MGNREGA, I conclude that Rajasthan needs political engagement strategies rather than merely technocratic solutions if this downturn is to be arrested.

Global information technology (IT) spending has seen phenomenal increases over the last decade and a half. Amidst claims of increased productivity through greater IT usage in production processes, India, like some of the other developing countries, has adopted policies to facilitate the growth of the IT services industry. Such policies are adopted under the belief that the IT sector would also increase productivity of the economy through linkages, thereby facilitating development. In this article, input–output (IO) analysis for India reveals that both backward and forward linkages between the IT sector and other sectors of the economy have been stagnant and declining, respectively, over time. Although IT usage in terms of value added in a given sector has increased, it is much lower than in other developing and industrialized countries. I conclude by discussing some policy directions to improve India’s IT integration with the economy and improve domestic productivity, linking it with the national manufacturing policy, the recent ‘Make in India’ initiative and other policies of the Indian government which help ease doing business in India and development through usage of IT services.

Domestic violence is recognized as a serious violation of women’s basic rights. Conventional economic models of domestic violence suggest that higher labour force participation by women leads to a decrease in domestic violence. In this article, we study the relationship between women’s employment and domestic violence using the ecological framework of violence developed by Heise (1998). We use a sample of 69,704 married women aged 15–49 years from Round III of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data (2005–2006) for our analysis. We report a positive association between women’s labour force participation and physical as well as emotional abuse by husbands: employed women are thus more exposed to intimate partner violence. However, we did not find much evidence that domestic violence resulted from a larger control of household resources by working women. We argue that the emotional cost may become high for men when household decision-making power diverges from the traditional gender norm, and men may turn to violence to restore their domestic dominance.