Routledge Handbooks. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. xxvi, 378 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures.) US$175.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-367-27238-8.
Before India’s Planning Commission was renamed as the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog by the Narendra Modi government in 2015, it had pursued a comprehensive approach to inclusive policies and growth. The idea of inclusive growth governed the eleventh Five-Year Plan (2007–2012), and the twelfth Five-Year Plan (2012–2017) followed it up by proclaiming that India should aim at “faster, sustainable, and more inclusive growth.” The idea was that individuals should be accommodated and find their place in the larger market economy, which reflected a worldwide neo-liberal trend of economic development planning.
The rhetoric of inclusive policies comes to mind when reading the book under review, The Routledge Handbook of Exclusion, Inequality and Stigma in India. Some of the chapters do refer to the twelfth Five-Year Plan (such as chapter 11), but the book does not specifically analyze how the idea of inclusive policies matters for the book itself. Nor is there any engagement with the critical scholarship on neo-liberal development planning. The book has a different goal: it is more concerned with the social and economic questions as they emerge on the ground in India. The two editors state that the book is “a dedicated repository” to describe and mitigate “the problems of exclusion based on gender, caste, religion, ethnicity, colour, race and nationality” (1). This aim suggests that it is largely offered as a problem-solving contribution, and several chapters also provide specific recommendations. As a reader, however, I was wondering what a handbook should be, as it also reads like a collection of conference papers. In any case, the contributors offer a mapping of problems concerning exclusion, inequalities, and stigma rather than a unified argument as one would find in a monograph.
The book is organized into an introduction and 32 chapters, originally presented at a conference in Delhi in 2017. In their introduction, the editors explain the key terms of exclusion, inequality, and stigma. Later chapters do not utilize their conceptual definitions and tend to stand on their own. The book is divided into five thematic parts: exclusion, inequality, gender discrimination, health hiatus, as well as violence and trafficking. Even though the contributions include discussions of caste and gender, they do not systematically utilize the seminal readings in these fields. Nor does the book address the relevant administrative architecture at the level of the union and the states. Instead, the volume has an emphasis on economics; while 19 of its contributors are either economists or in related disciplines, other scholars supplement with many empirical observations across different topics.
The first part deals with exclusion and contains six chapters, including literacy, financial inclusion, discrimination of children of manual scavengers in Rajasthan, caste discrimination, and exclusion at the labour markets. In their chapter on literacy, IC Awasthi and HK Varshney use National Sample Survey data to map the levels of literacy. They find that the level of literacy has improved somewhat for historically excluded groups such as scheduled castes (SC) and scheduled tribes (ST) in urban areas, whereas the literacy level among SCs in rural areas is just 63 percent and 64 percent for STs in 2011–2012 (24–25). The chapter on poverty is eclectic, but it concludes by stating that one-fourth of the poor households do not participate in social events and are therefore excluded on a daily basis (52). Nida Khan’s chapter on children of manual scavengers in Rajasthan works well as an introduction to the topic of exclusion and untouchability; the paper offers definitions and empirical insights into the problems these children face in school.
The second part deals with inequality and includes informative chapters. This includes data on rising inequalities (chapter 7), street vendors (chapter 9), and intercaste marriages (chapter 12), although a chapter on time allocation in television is unclear and seems misplaced in this book. The third part is concerned with gender discrimination. The section is somewhat uneven and does not reflect the strong and vibrant scholarship on this topic, although there are some noteworthy exceptions. Chapter 17 includes eyeopeners about practical challenges for women migrant workers. The chapter on employment and female participation by Arvind Kumar Singh offers a stimulating discussion; he concludes that most workers are confined to the agricultural sector despite contributing “a mere 14% to the GDP of India” (236). The chapter on disabled women utilizes the scholarly literature quite well and contributes to the book’s theme on stigma through its discussion of disability and sexuality.
The fourth part on health also contains a different set of themes, and it is useful to include health in discussions of exclusion, stigma, and inequality. This section includes original discussions of teaching mathematics for students with visual challenges. It also addresses the tragic use of “fairness creams,” a growing industry promoted by advertisements and in the movie industry. Ravi Kant’s chapter differs from the others, offering a conceptual discussion of the human development index. The fifth and shortest part of the book is concerned with violence and trafficking. It includes chapters on acid attacks, trafficking as a threat to women, and violence against differently abled persons.
Taken together, the chapters are more concerned with specific themes and cases, and many seem less systematically focused on the academic literature in their fields. The chapters on caste discrimination, for instance, do not utilize the broad literature on this topic. Additionally, many chapters rely on surprisingly old references, much of it predating the current right-wing regime. The ideal reader for this volume might be a student exploring how to study exclusion or a policy maker, rather than senior scholars and postgraduate students. The book offers some useful data as well as a couple of stimulating chapters and observations, but its agenda is a bit too broad.
Dag Erik Berg
Molde University College, Molde