1,720,977 research outputs found
IMP #6. Welcome to the Grand University Hotel
Get PDFWe are delighted to welcome you back to the Grand University Hotel, where your comfort, convenience, and academic success are our foremost priorities. Recent disruptions like HVAC repairs, mold remediation, water leakage, and even gas pipeline upgrades have been necessary to ensure that your stay remains world-class. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused
Cities without Sovereignty
Get PDFWhen New York elected Zohran Mamdani as its youngest mayor in a century, the reactions here were quite curious. We recognised the language of hope in the form of rent freezes, free buses and universal healthcare. But we also know that such promises would sound absurd coming from an Indian mayor. New York’s mayor can govern because the city has money, law, and autonomy. Cities in India, by contrast, have rarely been at the centre of transformative politics
Technology and election integrity in India
No full text968.8 million[1] citizens were eligible to vote in the 2024 general elections in India, making it the largest in the history of any democracy in the world. Managing this large electorate is not an easy task. Since the first general elections were held in 1951-52, ballot papers contained the names of candidates, the parties they represent and electoral symbols. On completion of voting, booth workers assigned by the Election Commission of India (ECI) will count the votes by hand. One of the concerns which emerged in this era was “booth capture” wherein party-workers could engage in voter suppression or stuffing ballot boxes with fake votes by intimidating booth-level officials
Why Economists Don't Like Avial
Get PDFPolitical economy of development has always felt to me like avial. As I understand its origin, avial was an afterthought. The dish came together from leftover vegetables that did not fit into the week’s menu. No single ingredient warranted a preparation of its own. Each, taken individually, was ordinary. But when combined—and held together by coconut, yoghurt, curry leaves, and seasoning—the result could be unexpectedly coherent. The ingredients could change depending on what one preferred or what happened to be left in the kitchen. The logic of the dish stayed the same
IMP #9. Publish and Perish
Get PDFIn October 2025, several Hindi dailies reported that a professor from my department has been accused of defrauding forty-nine scholars through a conference that promised publication in a Scopus-indexed journal after peer review. I had sent a paper to that conference. It was not a naive decision. The paper had been moving through journals since 2022 with two rejections, multiple revisions, and neglect for several months. When the call for papers arrived from a colleague, I recognised it as a shortcut and went ahead. I wanted the work to appear somewhere rather than remain an unfinished file on my desktop
IMP #7. Why is Everything an Emergency?
Get PDFThis week, a draft “Research Code of Conduct” appeared in our inboxes with only a couple of hours to respond. I flagged it in a university WhatsApp group because the timeline felt suspicious. Within a few minutes of my post, the deadline was extended by 48 hours. The timing itself tells a story. Policies are pushed through so fast that no one can really absorb them, let alone debate them. By the time you look up, silence has already been counted as agreement
How did Capitalism Become a Global System?
Get PDFThis essay began as an attempt to make sense of a recurring argument within left political economy: how capitalism should be explained once its global expansion no longer resembles the European experience that originally gave rise to its theories. The immediate trigger was a recent controversy around an interview with Vivek Chibber in Jacobin. But this piece is not about that exchange, nor is it written for participants in online ideological disputes. The argument Chibber re-entered is far older and far broader. It runs through a century of debates in Marxist political economy about colonialism, labour, the state, and uneven development—debates that emerged not from abstract theory, but from attempts to explain societies across Asia, Africa, and Latin America where capitalism took durable forms that standard European models could not easily account for
Deindustrialization in the Global South: A Case Study of the IT Sector and Its Workers in Thiruvananthapuram City, India
No full textThere is considerable heterogeneity in the process of deindustrialization across the world, especially between the global north and south. In India, deindustrialization has been characterized by “jobless growth” in formal manufacturing and faster long-term services growth. At the subnational level and across sectors, there is no clear indication of a structural change as was seen in the West preceding deindustrialization either. A core facet of this is manufacturing firms increasingly moving towards selling services. This, in addition to a new growth paradigm which is more service led in general, can have implications for growth and inequality in these late-developing countries in South Asia. Based on unstructured interviews with over a hundred IT service workers (including software engineers) conducted in 2018–19, this chapter aims to document the circumstances of the creation of an information technology services workforce in a non-metropolitan city in the global south in the context of the macroeconomic phenomenon of heterogenous deindustrialization
IMP #5. Hard Truths about the Indian PhD
Get PDFThere is a great deal of online advice for those planning to apply to PhD programmes. Most of it is for students looking abroad, to the U.S.A., Europe or Australia, for fully-funded, prestigious doctoral fellowships. These posts are full of optimism on how to secure a visa, write a statement of purpose, or network with potential advisors. There’s very little writing on what it means to apply for a PhD in India. When it does exist, it’s either promotional material or aspirational in a vague, credentialist way
IMP #2. The Institution Does Not Care
Get PDFHow do you speak of labour, or ecological justice when the land beneath your classroom was once farmland acquired through coercive state facilitation? When the university’s chancellor is a billionaire and a ruling party MP? When critical thinking is part of the brand, but not of governance? Being able to answer these questions shapes every decision I make as a teacher and scholar inside one of India’s premier private liberal arts universities. And they signal broader contradictions that are now foundational to India’s expanding private higher education sector
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