In this account of the protests in Chennai against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and National Register of Citizens, important questions about the nature of dissent and who is allowed to protest are brought to the fore.
The police surveillance on young people in Kerala seems to have risen to new heights with active monitoring of youth lifestyles, which the police perceive to be linked to youth crime. These micro-fascisms only reveal the growing weakness of the pillars of 20th century Malayalee social disciplining. It is up to the politicised youth, however, to turn this into an opportunity for democratic transformation.
Younger persons have been the worst sufferers of the illicit drugs trade in Punjab. Although contrabands have spread their tentacles in all parts, the scourge of drugs has been concentrated in certain localities, clusters, and villages. The demand for illicit drugs in Punjab is largely met from outside the state through a supply network controlled by the local, interstate, and international drug traffi ckers.
Drawing on long-term multisite ethnographic fieldwork in Allahabad and Meerut, this article examines how educated unemployed young men, from different socio-economic backgrounds, struggle for employment and engage with politics and religion in the age of neo-liberalism.
If India's experiment with "smart" urbanisation is to succeed, there is a critical need for investing in the priorities of youth, creation of jobs they aspire to have, spaces they can engage with and thereby connecting them with the city. Rather than an undue emphasis on "harnessing technology" for the betterment of citizens, the focus should be on inclusive urbanisation, where no one is left behind.
Juxtaposing data collected in the 1950s with data from 2013, this paper describes some of the consequences of a crisis of agriculture in India as a crisis of values and aspirations. Among a relatively prosperous Patidar community in western India, agriculture continues to be economically remunerative while farmers are considered poor. Instead, the ability to secure a job away from land, to move out of the village and possibly overseas have come to constitute new markers of status in a traditionally competitive society. The paper departs from common representations of the caste as an upwardly mobile and successful group, and focuses instead on the discontent and on those who try to achieve the new values of the caste, but fail. As a consequence of failure it shows how Patidars recur to what, from an outsider's point of view, may seem paradoxical: in order to "move up" and participate in the culture and economy of the caste, they have to "move down." In this respect, the paper also contributes to understanding the unevenness of India's growth and the contrary trends that work both to strengthen and weaken caste identity.
Indian agriculture has an image problem. There is decreasing interest among educated rural youth to enter agriculture-related professions due to the persistent perception of agriculture as an outdated occupation with minimal financial returns.
