Structures of Power

Kale, Sunila S.

doi:10.1215/1089201x-2826037

Cited by 16 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 19 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Media publicity featured as prominently as the campaigns of companies, with the Times of India launching its own Beautiful Homes feature in Bombay in March 1934, ‘designed to afford practical aid to our readers in the achievement of beauty, character, comfort, and efficiency in their houses’. (MacGowan 2016: 428) Taken in the aggregate, access to electricity within homes remained restricted, even as supplies grew—by 1944, a mere 3.3 per cent of electricity in Bombay province was used to run lights and electric fans (Kale 2014: 466). In Calcutta similarly, while the area served by the Calcutta Electric Supply Company had close to 1.5 million people, merely 57,415 houses were connected with electrical wiring by 1940 (Sharan 2020: 252).…”

Section: Ventilation: Purifying Air and Ensuring Comfortmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domestic environments, urban air and climate change

Sharan¹

2021

Contributions to Indian Sociology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Climate change and the pandemic, each in its own way, has powerfully drawn our attention to the imbrication of human lives with non-humans. In this article, I attempt to address these linkages through a focus on energy use and environment in Indian cities, especially in domestic settings. The introduction section of the article presents its background. The second section discusses weather and the colonial science of climatology in thinking about ventilation and thermal comfort, and ends with an account of air conditioning in Indian cities. The third section offers a history of efforts at mitigating indoor air pollution through a transition in energy use from biomass to the use of gas and electricity. In conclusion, I draw attention to the translation that is involved in thinking about energy, urbanism and climate change historically and in the contemporary period.

show abstract

Section: Ventilation: Purifying Air and Ensuring Comfortmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domestic environments, urban air and climate change

Sharan¹

2021

Contributions to Indian Sociology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…When India gained independence in 1947, electrification was limited to a small number of urban areas (Kale 2014). Over time, the need to electrify pumpsets to extract groundwater for the high-yield plant varieties introduced under the agricultural green revolution enabled rural electrification (Smith and Urpelainen 2016).…”

Section: Rural Electrification In India and Rggvymentioning

confidence: 99%

Inequality in policy implementation: caste and electrification in rural India

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We examine unequal outcomes in the implementation of India’s national rural electrification program in Uttar Pradesh. We ask two questions: (1) to what extent did Dalits, the lowest group in India’s caste hierarchy, receive less attention when the state electrified rural communities? (2) Was BSP, the state’s Dalit party, able to reduce this inequality? Using data from a hundred thousand villages, we provide robust evidence for unequal outcomes. Villages inhabited solely by Dalits were 20 percentage points less likely to be covered by the program than villages without any Dalits. Moreover, a regression discontinuity analysis shows that the electoral success of BSP failed to reduce such differences. These results highlight the magnitude and persistence of caste inequality in the implementation of democratic public policy, despite political representation.

show abstract

“…This was particularly pronounced in the power sector. The colonial prehistory of Indian electricity was regionally variegated (Kale 2014b). The constitutional division of responsibility only exacerbated this divergence.…”

Section: Dysfunction (2): the Underlying Crisis Of Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distinctively Dysfunctional: ‘State Capitalism 2.0’ and the Indian Power Sector

Chatterjee

2019

Changing Contexts and Shifting Roles of the Indian State

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

State intervention in India has persisted but has proved far from immune to critiques of traditional dirigisme. An examination of the power sector shows that waves of reforms since 1991 have together created a hybrid and regionally differentiated state-market system. Blurring the public-private boundary, this reinvented "state capitalism 2.0" displays both refurbished modes of intervention and new governance arrangements with private players. Nonetheless, as the power sector's continually dismal condition suggests, this state-capitalist hybrid has not (yet) provided a coherent alternative to older dirigisme or the Anglo-American mode of "deregulatory" liberalization. Instead, between 1991 and 2014 its ad hoc, layered emergence generated distinctive forms of dysfunction.Coupled with competitive politics, its ever-increasing institutional complexity rendered it internally incoherent and vulnerable to rent seeking on multiple fronts.Power sector evidence suggests that state intervention in India has remained simultaneously indispensable and dogged by persistent administrative and financial difficulties. Examining its internal institutional transformations helps to explain the apparently contradictory nature of the contemporary Indian state: at once business-friendly, populist, and often underperforming. 1 Reinventing state interventionIn recent years state intervention has enjoyed a renewal of academic interest. Scholars wrote of the "flexible" or "hidden" developmental states of pre-recession Ireland and the United States (Ó Riain 2000; Block 2008), the rise of a more "regulatory" form of state activism in China (Yang 2004; Hsueh 2011), and the "new", "liberal", or "renewed" developmentalism of Brazil, then still growing strongly (Ban 2013;Trubek 2013;Hochstetler and Montero 2013). This nascent literature suggested that the state activism of the twenty-first century was far from a return to the old centrally planned dirigisme of the twentieth: the state's forms and activities had been transformed in the face of changing economic and political contexts.According to this interpretation, the second generation of state intervention has two interrelated "vocations" (Levy 2006: 368). It is corrective, seeking to repair ineffectual elements in older national models-often in line with Washington Consensus-style critiques.But it is also constructive, oriented towards creating, supporting, and adjusting rather than dominating markets. As such it is characterized by new forms of public-private governance arrangements and the increasing exposure of state agencies to the discipline of market competition, however asymmetric in practice (Trubek 2013;Musacchio and Lazzarini 2014).This fusion of dirigisme and liberalization has many labels, but perhaps the most catchy and evocative is "state capitalism 2.0". 1 For a brief moment in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, state capitalism 2.0 captured attention as a possible alternative to the Anglo-American deregulatory model. India often featured as a marginal example i...

show abstract

Structures of Power

Cited by 16 publications

References 19 publications

Domestic environments, urban air and climate change

Domestic environments, urban air and climate change

Inequality in policy implementation: caste and electrification in rural India

Distinctively Dysfunctional: ‘State Capitalism 2.0’ and the Indian Power Sector

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About