Articles by Abhirup Sarkar

When banks are struggling to reduce bad loans, Bandhan, with a recovery rate of more than 99.5% in microfi nance, has entered the banking industry. Will its microfinance experience help it meet the challenges of mainstream banking?

This article presents empirical evidence on educational investments by members of different castes and religion using household-level, cross-sectional data from West Bengal. It finds that scheduled caste households invest significantly less than other households in private coaching of children, even after controlling for all available socio-economic background variables. This result is posited to arise from two possible sources: from cultural factors and from positive discriminative practices. The article develops an empirical strategy to determine which type of factor is more significant and finds that cultural factors are more likely than positive discriminative practices to be the source of the lower spending.

This paper examines factors underlying the unusual stability of political power in rural West Bengal, using data pertaining to the functioning of local democracy from a household survey conducted by the authors during 2003-05. It examines patterns of political awareness, participation, distribution of benefits by gram panchayats, and voting across households of varying socio-economic characteristics. The main findings are that (i) political participation was high on average; (ii) within villages panchayat benefits flowed to poor and scheduled caste/scheduled tribe groups on par or better, compared with the rest of the population; (iii) distribution of benefits across villages was biased against those with more landless households; and (iv) the lasting political success of the Left owed partly to a clientelist relationship of the party with the voters, and partly to the gratitude of voters of low socio-economic status arising out of broad-based changes.

The paper is concerned with the phenomenon of unusual political stability in West Bengal coupled with moderate economic development in the state since the inception of Left Front rule. It is argued that this coexistence cannot be fully explained by agricultural growth or land reforms. An explanation is provided in terms of informalisation of the economy along with a strong party organisation of the left.


55 Cf J P Naik Educational Planning in India.
Allied Publisher . Bombay, 1965, p 85 56 8 Neill op cit, p 86.
57 S Nurullah and J P Naik, op cit, p 270.