Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta

Using large-scale health survey data for India, we tried to identify various socio-economic and health-related factors that influence hardship financing events, employing multinomial logistic framework. The findings indicate that 21% of women have resorted to some form of hardship financing, and strategies like borrowing, property selling and various hybrid strategies are significantly concentrated among various socio-economic vulnerable groups. We find that unemployed mothers and farming couples are more prone to experience hardship financing events. Instances of using saving and borrowing, a hybrid strategy, were found to increase with the usage of private facilities. However, since the majority of public facility users belong to lower wealth classes and are blue-collar workers, instances of jewelry selling increased. Apart from private health insurances, various employer and employee-funded insurances reduced several hardship-financing events. The Rasthriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, which provides insurance to unorganized sector workers below the poverty line, lowered instances of saving and borrowing, which is mostly used by the poorer section. Given widespread implementation among the masses, the Janani Suraksha Yojana was also found to reduce a few hardship financing events.

Over fifty percent of the population in Tanzania suffers from multidimensional poverty. Because of the high rate of poverty and slow improvements, ending poverty by the year 2030 remains an empirically testable proposition and part of a shared challenge. The main purpose of this study is to predict multidimensional poverty status with the help of best performance-supervised machine-learning algorithms. To achieve this objective, longitudinal data of 2014/15 and 2020/21 datasets, sourced from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) are analyzed. Various supervised machine-learning algorithms such RBF Kernel in SVM, Linear Kernel in SVM, Polynomial Kernel in SVM, Random Forest, Logistic regression classifier, Decision tree, Gradient Boosting, K-Nearest Neighbours Classifier and Naïve Bayes Classifier are implemented in order to predict multidimensional poverty status in each dataset. This captures the dynamic changes from 2014 to 2021 at the national level. Data pre-processing and adjusting unbalanced data through weighted categorical cross entropy are to overcome the inefficiencies due to overfitting and under-fitting of the algorithms. Regarding evaluation metrics, we show that the RBF Kernel in the SVM algorithm has achieved the best performance model in both balanced and unbalanced datasets. Our policy responses draw on the results of the algorithm.

This paper constructs a competitive trade model involving countries in two distinct time zone locations. Our results suggest that geographical distance positively impact service trade, in contrast to its harmful nature for goods trade. These results are not in line with the traditional gravity arguments of international trade. Our model also reveals an intriguing relationship: an increase in distance between trading nations results in higher skilled wages and lower rent in case of service trade, while goods trade yields the opposite effect. We then connect distance with delaying cost and find the effects of delaying cost on trade and factor prices. We further extend our basic model to introduce informal sector and government manufacturing sector. Despite these additions, the consistency in the effects of distance on factor prices and output persists.

Looking at Anurag Kashyap’s two-part saga Gangs of Wasseypur, which has now achieved cult status amongst audiences of mainstream Hindi cinema, this paper will attempt to study what may be called the emergence of certain newer modes of conceiving marginal masculinities in contemporary Bombay cinema and the aesthetic framing of these gendered articulations through an imagination of spectacular violence. The film is a narrative of relentless violence in a small suburb of Dhanbad called Wasseypur that remains seemingly unaffected by the significant political events in the life of the nation: independence, Partition, the national Emergency or the formation of the state of Jharkhand. Kashyap seems to suggest that this is a world that is yet to enter the realm of postcolonial modernity entirely. Subjected to the director’s almost anthropological gaze, it appears brutish, primeval, even primitive. What is the shape of masculinities in contest that emerges through the film’s visual imagination and its popular reception? How to articulate the questions of nation and community within a cinematic universe crowded with images of raw machismo and (anti) heroic violence? What is the struggle between the film’s sensorium and the political articulations it could have potentially become symbolic of? Is it possible to raise the question of collective rights and justice within this apparently “realistic” universe populated by marginalized and arguably “subaltern” men? In short, what shape does the idea of justice take within the very masculine cinematic expanse of Wasseypur?

This study examines how Indigenous women evaluate their experiences regarding inequality, discrimination, and violence using an intersectionality approach. The contributions of ethnicity, class, and gender as robust systems have been mainly overlooked in traditional studies on anti-Indigenous violence. However, this study shows significant disparities in perception and experience based on gender and ethnic identities through 33 in-depth semi-structured interviews. Participants experienced inequality, discrimination, and violence rooted in gender and Indigenous identity. Indigenous women also implied that they were misrepresented or negatively represented due to ethnicity and being culturally distinct historically by non-Indigenous scholars. Such negative representation leads Indigenous women to experience various kinds of formal, informal, physical, and verbal discrimination and violence at the workplace, where non-Indigenous people often defamed the participants using Indigenous slurs. In addition, findings suggest multiple layers of oppression because of their social position oppressed Indigenous women; this should be examined through intersectional lens.

On 23 September 1965, the Marxist playwright and director Utpal Dutt was arrested from his home in Calcutta by the ruling Congress government. The reason cited for this arrest was one of Dutt’s political essays published in the Deshhitaishi, the weekly mouthpiece of the Communist Party of India in Bengal. The essay, titled “One Aspect of the Struggle” was deemed “seditious” by the government. Copies of the magazine carrying the “offensive” piece were seized. However, it was clear to everyone that it was Dutt’s recent play Kallol (“The Waves”), first staged on 29 March 1965 at the Minerva theatre in North Calcutta, which had led to this sudden repressive measure. Kallol’s version of nationalist history and the popularity that the play was gaining among the people of Bengal had scared the ruling government. The political establishment and its supporters in the mainstream media were afraid that this immensely popular production would incite mass protests against the Congress-run state government in Bengal, a particularly risky proposition in the time of a “patriotic” war against Pakistan. Dutt’s incarceration, rather than quelling the popularity of Kallol among audiences, added to the people’s enthusiasm and celebratory struggles around it. It also gave Bengal one of its most popular political slogans “Kallol cholchhe, cholbe!” [“Kallol is running and will keep running!”]. This chapter will attempt to retrace the contours of this almost legendary moment in Bengal’s cultural history teasing out the complex negotiations between the claims of a leftist political theatre, an incensed middle-class urban audience, and the repressive state machinery that failed to contain the upsurge of popular revolutionary sentiment, through residual colonial legal categories of ‘sedition’ and treason.

The paper explains the origin of the financial crisis in one country and its spread to other countries—contagion, in a dynamic model of international capital inflow. The origin of the crisis is rooted in this model in the common international loan market, and crisis can occur even when the countries are not interconnected via bi-lateral or multi-lateral trade and commerce, when connected via trade or commerce the contagion hits with a stronger effect. The paper introduces country-level heterogeneity of risk of default for individual countries in the borrowing group which generates interesting cases of the contagion effect. A change in the risk of default of an individual country adversely affects the total supply in the international loan market leading to crises in other countries via increased international interest rates. It has an enhanced effect when the risk of default depends on the lagged domestic productivity of the borrowing country. The model can explain various episodes of financial crisis in a common framework and can be usefully employed for policy formulation.

In the aftermath of COVID-19 and war on Ukraine, most countries around the world are suffering from high inflation and unemployment. The rise in the price of consumables affect all, but workers with market-determined wages suffer more than those who benefit from institutional wage bargaining. Workers outside union coverage expect fall in both nominal and real wages in the long run. However, inflation raises real wage of non-union workers if high rental return improves nominal wage due to substitution. Partial wage indexation by union workers hurts non-union real wage, but sector-specific capital raises it.

How does trade in intermediate commodities affect the emission levels in South Asian countries? The prevailing literature has engaged with production fragmentation and trade in intermediate goods for a long time; yet the environmental impact of trade in intermediates is less understood. This paper deals with a panel of eight South Asian countries producing pollution-intensive commodities, between 1998 and 2018 to estimate if the export and import of intermediate products affect the emission of CO2 in these countries. The paper uses a number of covariates including foreign capital inflows, trade with rich countries, and interaction terms with the level of industrialization in these countries. The location and institution-based instrumental variable regression supported by dynamic panel estimates indicate that greater fragmentation indeed leads to more emission. The deepening of the industrial threshold moderates the negative impact. We conduct robustness analyses to substantiate these results.

The pivotal concern of this study is to investigate how age, social status, language, and cultural background interact to affect women’s control over and susceptibility to disrespect during birth setting in Jharkhand, India. Women, particularly, belonging from tribal community were directly impacted by disrespect during birth settings, which happens during pregnancy, labor, and the first few weeks following delivery. Hence, the article aims to uncover the effects of disrespect during birth setting on patient’s trust in birth setting facilities and health care teams. Besides, this study also adds to challenge the culture of silence that currently surrounds this issue. The study was conducted in the Sisai block of Jharkhand’s Gumla district, where focus group discussion (FGD) with the assistance of 18 public health midwives (PHMs) and 24 individuals with prior parturition experience were involved. The qualitative data was categorized and analyzed using an intersectional framework, which facilitated the identification of significant themes and patterns. The results show that power dynamics and repressive institutions associated with gender, ethnicity, social, linguistic, and cultural inequality were intertwined with disrespect during birth setting, especially with tribal women. In conclusion, the standard of birthing treatment in India needs to be improved, especially in tribal regions.

This study focuses on the interplay between migration, mobility, and the emergence of traditional leadership among in-migrants within the capital city of Ghana. The issues of migration to the city have gained a lot of scholarly attention, but less on how migrants establish leadership among themselves in such a strange community. This study delves into the Ghanaian context to understand how chieftaincy titles are socially constructed, thereby shaping the emergence of leadership among individuals who have migrated within the country, particularly from northern to southern Ghana. The study employs a qualitative research design, where participants were purposively selected and interviewed through in-depth interviews, alongside participant observation, yet data was analysed through thematic network analysis. Findings revealed that in-migrant leaders within the capital city are often given chieftaincy titles and referred to as “chiefs” by their respective subjects with their accompanying symbols of authority. However, the modes of recruitment of these “chiefs” alongside their symbols of authority are all but socially constructed. These titles are pervasive across many communities in the national capital, Accra. The study concludes that despite the rapid transformation of modern Ghanaian cities, traditional systems of leadership have continued to enjoy the support of the people and persist through the newer forms of governance across various regimes. The study, therefore, undermines the prediction by the modernization theory that traditional forms of authority will wither over time amidst State transformation.

Research has shown that the relationship between economic freedom and corruption is rather complex. While some studies suggest a negative relationship, others show the matter to be more nuanced. While more regulations are known to foster corrupt institutions, a competitive market can also incentivize bribery and corruption. Our study examines the role of economic freedom as it relates to perceived corruption, measured via a survey conducted in India. Using firm-level data, we explore the relationship between perceived corruption in the formal sector and economic freedom across Indian states. In our baseline results for Indian firms, we find a significantly negative relationship between perceived corruption and lagged economic freedom. These results hold when we design matching models and include a number of potentially confounding factors to control for identification issues. Additionally, we show that small and young firms and those with sole ownership perceive greater benefits from higher economic freedom. In contrast, older firms perceive higher corruption when economic freedom is higher. This lends support to the idea that competition facilitated by economic freedom can increase rent seeking behavior. Our study contributes to the literature by emphasizing that the relationship between economic freedom and corruption in India is layered, with firm characteristics playing a crucial role.

During and often in the aftermath of economic and financial crises, the stress arising from internal resource generation and re-distribution translates into contentious international negotiations scaling up to situations of conflict. A country suffering from internal disputes, economic slowdown and poor growth could initiate conflicts to reverse the popular perception regarding the ability of a government to address pressing economic and social concerns. Access to natural resources of value could accentuate unusual pressure from within a country leading to conflicts—one that international trade cannot offer as a solution. This chapter offers an overview of conditions, such as resource rents, under which some countries might choose to engage in border aggression despite fear of economic sanctions, high magnitude of losses and other potential international problems. The approach borderlines the normative and institutional explanation for the democratic peace as explored in the literature on international relations. In addition, it explores how mineral rents and growth of military budget influence international conflicts at the cross-country level.

Beneficial influence of female representation in implementing environment-friendly policies have been documented in recent studies. However, presence of factors such as corruption and bureaucratic red tapes, known to hinder development initiatives, raises question about whether women legislators can achieve the desired level of success with environmental policies. Based on our empirical analysis using cross-sectional data for 83 countries, we find evidence that the positive impact of women in parliament on climate change policy outcomes is significant and most effective for countries with low levels of corruption. Depending on the model specification used, ranging from instrumental variable regressions to inclusion of controls to mitigate omitted variable bias, and matching models, we do find that the beneficial impact of women in parliament becomes insignificant and eventually might become negative with rising corruption. Thus, while women might be able to successfully propose a bill for and turn-into-law, environment-friendly policies in countries with low levels of corruption, the effort is nullified and might be reversed in case of countries with high corruption. We illustrate that the results are sensitive to model selection, and choice of controls.

This article examines the Narendra Modi regime in India. Often acerbic political rhetoric is attached to official policies of the regime, creating fear and hopelessness within sections of the population. In this study, five sets of political activities of the government are evaluated. First, cultural authoritarianism became apparent with complicity toward “cow vigilantism,” slapping sedition charges against those showing political dissent, banning the history books of selected progressives, and stereotyping sections of the left and liberals as antinationals. Second, the demonetization policy was implemented without adequately following the economic protocols of the state. Third, the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Bill indicates the thwarting of democratic and federalist ideas. Fourth, the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens exercise in Assam demonstrate the communal-fascist worldview of the regime in profiling population groups. Finally, the sloppy handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the new Information Technology rules show the government's callous approach toward science and privacy. By analyzing such political activities, the article points out that majoritarian religious nationalism, coupled with authoritarianism, has been the ideological expression of the Modi regime, coexisting with both state surveillance and electoral democracy.

COVID-19 has adverse impacts on contact-intensive sectors, viz., manufacturing, tourism, and the entertainment sector (ES). In a general equilibrium (GE) model with online, entertainment and informal sectors employing skill, unskilled, and capital, we show that COVID-19 could cause polarization pushing contact-intensive entertainment industry on the brink of collapse while the other two survive. Dual roles of factor intensity and contact intensity (CI) contribute to such finite changes, triggering inter-skill wage inequality. This is the first of its kind to offer a theoretical mechanism capturing the contractionary effects on contact-intensive sectors and wage inequality. These results match with the literature emphasizing the hardships faced by the cultural sector.

How does out-migration of skilled workers affect unskilled workers’ wage in the source country? When skilled workers emigrate, unskilled wages tend to go down in some countries. If the sector that uses both skilled and unskilled workers shows a lower degree of capital intensity as compared to sectors that use only skilled workers in production, it is a common outcome. We use 19 years of cross-country data from the International Labor Organization (ILO) spanning Asia and Latin America to show that skill emigration reduces unskilled wage unambiguously over panel fixed effects and difference GMM estimates. The structure is also subjected to system GMM with endogenous covariates and allied robustness checks. Importantly, we find a critical level of tertiary education, such that countries generating more shall face weaker negative impact on unskilled wages.

The upsurge of political violence in Ghana is a threat to the prospects and consolidation of the country’s democratic credentials. The paper examined the triggers of political violence in Ghana and the possible intervention strategies using data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED) on political violence in Ghana from 2000 to 2021. The desire to satisfy basic human needs, for power, coupled with weak and politicized institutions and elite manipulation of local and national political systems, were some of the standout triggers of political violence. Based on this, the study suggests general economic growth and development; restoring confidence and transformation of state institutions such as the Electoral Commission, National Commission for Civic Education, Judicial Service, CHRAJ, and Peace Council; establishing a national early warning and early response system; and conducting public education on political and electoral processes as intervention strategies. These revelations require the implementation of interventions that should be geared towards addressing conditions that create the triggers as well as addressing and managing such issues when they arise.