It explores the formation of India's rural middle class, which rests on a complex, and often contradictory, set of processes that began unfolding with growing industrialisation in rural areas. It examines its composition, characteristics and social identification from the perspectives of three major class theorists: Marx, Weber and Bourdieu.

Indian Tourism brings together leading experts from all over the world to assess the challenges and opportunities of the tourism sector in India and its correlation to the country’s economic performance and prospects.

This book offers an overview of India’s emerging digital economy and the resulting challenges and opportunities for urban workplaces. It examines contemporary economic and social transformations in India by focusing on how new technologies and policies are shaping urban work practices and patterns. The book emphasizes inclusive and equitable practices that consider the needs of the formal and informal sector workforce as essential to India’s urban development. Drawing on cross-disciplinary frameworks, it examines key issues related to work trends in the Indian urban economy and its digital landscapes, including Industry 4.0 and technology–labour nexus, smart cities and innovation, urbanism and consumerism, workplace transitions such as service industry and remote work, digital divide, skill development initiatives, and the impact of socio-economic inequalities and disruptions. The authors provide perspectives on the digital future of urban work in India and other emerging economies in the post-COVID-19 phase, and underscore the importance of enacting balanced policies, remodelling institutions, and equipping the labour force for adapting to new demands related to future employability and investments. This book will interest students, teachers, and researchers of urban studies, urban sociology, sociology of work, labour studies, human and urban geography, economic geography, urban economics, development studies, urban development and planning, public policy, regional planning, politics of urban development, social and cultural change, urban sustainability, environmental studies, management studies, South Asian Studies, and Global South studies. It will also be useful to policymakers, non-governmental organizations, activists, and those interested in India and the future of the global economy.

"As state funding to public universities becomes increasingly scarce, many universities have turned to a new student population to draw in revenue: international students. Typically fluent in English, and overwhelmingly enrolled in high-skill professional fields, students from India have consistently served as one of the most valuable student-migrant populations, and the United States has been their most popular destination. Assumed to be rationally calculating, ambitious, and globally minded consumers of higher education, these migrant youth are depicted as success stories of the global neoliberalization of education. But not all are wealthy or savvy, nor do they necessarily end up in a program that will leave them better off. Sociologist Susan Thomas followed a group of Indian middle-class men studying at a public university in New York for 16 months as they attended classes, worked in under-paid or unpaid research jobs, and socialized with each other. Thomas's ethnographic research shows that these men see themselves as pursuing successful careers, paths that they uniquely deserve due to their work ethic and intelligence. At the same time, that pathway is entangled within webs of obligation tethered to the imagined future returns of an American education. For these students, such obligations translate into an experience of indebtedness-materially, affectively, and morally. The students consider themselves the beneficiaries of an American education, accruing considerable financial debt to pay tuition and perceived moral debt to their families for the opportunity to study in the US, at the same time that they are marginalized on campus and off. They thus develop a logic of owing and being owed as a way to reconcile the ambivalences they experience while located on an American campus where they must form racial and class sensibilities as South Asian student-migrants. As students approach graduation, however, they are forced to reconcile the debts they have accrued with an uncertain return. Their final days on campus forced a reckoning with their anxieties about successful masculinities, which manifested through competitive frictions with one another, the uncertainties of supporting existing or future households, and the precarity of being drawn into the global knowledge economy as indebted migrants. Thomas illuminates not only how students' movements across national borders are an invaluable part of the neoliberalization of education, but also how this system forms indebted subjectivities"--

Such are the constraints of disciplinary boundaries that even when scholars come together in a collective effort to analyse recent processes, their focus narrows down to specific themes, invariably privileging one kind of methodological or conceptual framework over others. The present volume of essays the outcome of a seminar, Changing Social Formations in Contemporary India, organized under the auspices of the School of Social Sciences of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 2003 represents an attempt to overcome some of the limitations of this trend. While acknowledging the strengths of in-depth analyses of specific phenomena, there is an equally strong need to critically engage with the different dimensions of recent developments in India since independence, and especially since the 1980s and 1990s, by bringing multiple fields of expertise into play. Economists, political scientists, geographers, historians, sociologists and cultural critics have all contributed to this volume in significant ways. Taken together, these essays clearly demonstrate that India has entered a new conjuncture since the 1990s, quite unlike the era of development that preceded it.The volume includes essays on such contested concepts in contemporary India as democracy, globalization, the rural urban divide, the city, migration, the middle classes, caste, community and gender identities. It thus sets out to name some of the most urgent sites of engagement for inter-disciplinary social science scholarship today.Mary E. John teaches in the Women s Studies Programme, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.Praveen Kumar Jha teaches at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.Surinder S. Jodhka teaches at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

This is the first volume of an important and rigorously planned four-volume series that aims to close the gap between empirical observation and analysis and understanding in the study of political processes and their ramifications within the framework of Indian society and the post-Independence Indian state. This volume explores the dynamics of the state structures of contemporary India as products of the colonial and post-colonial eras. Various political and constitutional aspects of state formation in India are looked at by a distinguished panel of specialists from the perspective of the historic and dominant role played by the Indian National Congress. The main conclusions of this volume stem from the failure of the Indian Constitution to deliver on the promises contained in its provisions in critical spheres of politics such as the relations between the Centre and the States, relations between the bureaucracy and elected officials, access to opportunity for deprived members of society, and the removal of gender inequities and oppression.

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