Routledge New Horizons in South Asian Studies. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2023. xviii, 240 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures, maps.) US$160, cloth. ISBN 9781032318912.
This book boasts an impressive roster of Japan-based South Asia scholars from multiple institutions across Japan. While China has dominated media headlines for investing across Asia and beyond, Japan remains more adept at studying, researching, and commenting on India.
The introduction by the volume’s editor Tsukasa Mizushima declares that this book aims to “clarify what is happening at the bottom of society” in districts, villages, and hamlets and examine “regional differences over a long period” (1), and to contrast this against the ritual incantations of India’s economic success over the last few decades.
Much of this ambition shines through. This micro-expertise comes from an impressive commitment to in-depth fieldwork. Kurosaki uses detailed historical records to examine long-term productivity growth of agriculture, which impressively provides data on 18 major crops, 311 districts, and 19 major states across the twentieth century. The easy assumptions that the big events for Indian agriculture—liberalization after 1991 and the Green Revolution of the mid-1960s—are challenged with painstaking precision. Kurosaki finds that the break with colonial-era agricultural land and labour productivity stagnation was instead in the early-1950s (31). Yanagisawa provides two detailed village surveys from Tamil Nadu nearly 30 years apart that give local details to a familiar India-wide story of the decline of upper caste dominance in landowning. Less familiar was the collapse in the share of educated residents who are able to find formal sector jobs (60). This is striking evidence of the arms-race in education: ever higher qualifications being needed to access the same stagnant pool of prospective employers.
Thinking of India as an economic success since 1991, we often focus on telecommunications and ICT. Less often we think of agriculture. Esho shows how agriculture became more dairy-livestock oriented after the 1980s. Delicensing of the sector in the 1990s led to an explosion of private-sector dairy processing plants to utilize extra milk production (127). This growth was structured around the growth of dairy cooperative societies whose membership increased from 1.75 million in 1981 to 14.1 million in 2010 (131). How can we square a co-operative movement unleashed by market-oriented liberalization? We get the facts but Esho misses that enticing explanation.
From Sugimoto’s contribution I learned about a steep rise in the consumption of edible oils (109), which occurred most rapidly among the poorest farmers. Palm oil imports from Indonesia were liberalized in the mid-1990s and comprised almost one-quarter of edible oil consumption by 2009.
Wada repeats some well-known stories about child welfare—that a mother’s education is more important than a father’s. It was tantalizing to elsewhere learn in Wada’s chapter, that rural dummy variables relating to child welfare were significant in 1992–1993 but not by 2005–2006 (150). Why did living in a rural area cease to have a real impact on child welfare? While Sekido provides interesting, wider implications of the “Indian pattern” of consumption. Despite rapid economic growth, protein consumption (eggs, meat, and fish) in India only increased marginally across the 1990s and 2000s (177). A detailed empirical estimation of consumption, population, and migration shows that this will likely mean only a slow growth in nitrogen pollution.
In these examples the book has raised more questions that it has answered. Too often the book feels analytically incomplete. Construction appears in the book as an aside on numerous occasions. The introduction makes a passing assumption that construction is a precarious occupation (3); if so, this would be important, but where is the evidence for this? Usami and Rawal find that among the 15 to 21 rural age cohort, the share employed in construction doubled from 9.9 percent in 2004–2005 to 21 percent in 2011–2012 (82). What are they building and what are the economic implications of an agriculture-to-construction pattern of structural change?
Though this book is about the rural-urban nexus it is generally focused on the rural. Mizushima notes the slow pace of urbanization in India, with the urban share of the national population reaching only 28 percent in 2001 (209). Why was the pace so slow and what happened to urbanization after 2001? We are left wondering. Usami and Rawal note that a large share of educated young people remain in agriculture. They suggest one reason for this could be that a more marketized and technology-intensive agriculture has created greater managerial and education needs. An answer to this question would have been interesting as would a discussion of the alternative: To what extent was this due to the failure of urbanization to create jobs and pull the educated out of agriculture?
Usami and Rawal note that the labour force participation of women fell below 20 percent in urban areas by 2011–2012. The impact of expanded education on this pattern (70) is interesting. The near 100-million increase in women engaged in housework is also noted but not discussed; this change reflects deep-seated cultural constraints on the ability of women to work outside the household (70). The statistical presentation from Sugimoto about the consumption of cereals and edible oils makes no reference to the passionate recent debate about nutrition held between Utsa Patnaik, Angus Deaton, Arvind Panagariya, and Jean Dreze among others, or the recent efforts to pass a Right to Food Act.
The blurb, the introduction, and various chapters discuss contemporary India, specifically whether rapid economic growth and modernization has benefited the poorest people. Despite this emphasis, there is a surprising lack of “recent” in the book. Sekido advises the government to “accelerate the JNURM” (181) even though the program was phased out and replaced almost a decade ago. Wada studies child labour but only uses National Family Health Survey evidence between 1992–1993 and 2005–2006. Why not utilize the 2015–2016 survey? The bibliographical referencing also seems strangely dated. The latest reference in the book dates from 2016 and for many chapters the most recent reference is a decade or more old.
This is a rich, committed, and painstaking compilation of empirical data about the rural sector in India. Much of the book’s ambitions—to draw on fieldwork and focus on the local and the long durée—are successfully accomplished. Yet too often to fully appreciate the data, one needs to access analysis and discussion outside this volume.
Matthew McCartney
Charter Cities Institute, Washington, DC