Articles by Gail Omvedt

SOME books are dull to read but useful. Ajit Kumar Singh's Agricultural Development and Rural Poverty falls in this category. Basically it is a compilation of all the available government statistics, mostly macro-level but including some from micro-level farm management studies, on agriculture and rural class structure in Uttar Pradesh in the last decades. Though Singh takes a relatively uncritical attitude towards the quality of these statistics and makes no attempt to test any overall 'models', the very completeness and variety of the material itself is useful. And since much of the statistics are given with regional and district specifications, the study provides a useful data-base from which to begin an analysis of such current social-political phenomenon as Mahendra Singh Tikait's Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU)

Independence Gail Omvedt In Sangli district of Maharashtra divorced/deserted women have mobilised to demand that the state recognise their existence as heads of households and give them on a priority basis loans, pensions and houses under various government programmes.

On the jute industry Chakrabarty notes "the payment of the managing agents and managers often depended on the output'', Chakrabarty, op cit, p 285. Since the managing agents' primary earning was not related to the efficient running of the industrial concern so they were less bothered about cost-minimisation. They were rather interested in output-maximisation by any means. The index of efficiency to the managing agents was the volume of output.

Of Rural Proletarian Struggles: Mobilisation and Organisation of Rural Workers in Southwest India by K P Kannan; Oxford University Press, 1988;
K P KANNAN's study of "rural proletarianisation' in Kerala is an important effort to show how capitalist development penetrates an economy in the absence of large-scale factory-based industrialisation, and how this can serve as the base for militant communist-led organisation. It is also an analysis of the social-political conditions under which this organising has taken place and the limits it has reached in recent years. Since Kerala is one of the few states in India where the left movement has won a solid and stable organisational and electoral base

limited by the resource position of the colonial government, which had to meet imperial charges, like the expenses of the Indian Army not only in India but also in other parts of the British Empire. Relief works were undertaken by the colonial government not because of any altruism, but because imperialism required some stability in Indian peasant production, both as a source of raw materials and as a market for some industrial commodities.