This research agenda is led by 2022-24 CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow Shikhar Singh. The project focuses on how recent transformative changes in India’s welfare state affect voting behavior. Shikhar’s analysis suggests that digital public infrastructure has transformed the welfare state in three important ways: there is less discretion and favoritism with a move to rule-based targeting; there are fewer opportunities for rent-seeking through direct benefit transfer; and there has been an expansion in the repertoire of benefits because of public savings and increased capacity.

This research agenda is led by 2022-24 CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow Sarath Pillai. The history of Indian federalism is often assumed to have begin in 1947 when India attained independence and the founders met in the Constituent Assembly to debate India’s new constitution. This project offers both an alternative genealogy and ideological origins of Indian federalism and brings to light hitherto unknown global influences in Indian federal thought.

This research agenda is led by 2022-24 CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow Amrita Kurian. Dr. Amrita Kurian works on expertise and agrarian geographies in rural Andhra Pradesh. Her research provides a humanistic critique of state experts’ technical interventions to address emergent problems that threaten the sustainability of agriculture and agrarian livelihoods. It explains how, faced with such formidable challenges, the experts’ pursuit of quality frequently fails and faces increasing contention from farmers and traders on the ground.

CASI has launched the first systematic set of studies on the political economy of “small-scale urbanization” in India. A significant percentage of urban residents across the Global South live in small towns. In India, the percentage of citizens living in cities with populations less than 100,000 residents equals those living in million-plus cities. Indeed, 85% of India’s towns have less than 100,000 people. Yet little is known about the political economy of these urban local bodies. What governance challenges do small towns face? Why are small towns so unsuccessful in raising tax revenues?

What are urban seas made of? And how might those working in urban seas provide new modes and idioms for living in cities with sea level rise? This project provincializes the grounds of urban planning and urban theory by attending to the ways in which fishers living in the city in the sea are already organizing their livelihoods and social worlds with anthropogenic climate change and coastal pollution. Their changing practices may reveal new ways to live in cities in the sea in the future.

Project Note

This research agenda is led by Climate Postdoctoral Research Fellow Matt Barlow (Ph.D. in Anthropology, 2023, University of Adelaide). Dr. Matt Barlow works on questions related to environment, infrastructure, and waste in urban South India. Through this project, he analyzes efforts to address a waste crisis in Kochi, Kerala, by arguing that understandings of what waste is, and how infrastructures should be designed to manage it, are heavily influenced by environmental imaginaries. Across much of India, both waste and weather are categorized into two qualities: wet and dry.

This research agenda is led by CASI postdoctoral research fellow Kiran Kumbhar (PhD in History of Science, 2022, Harvard University). One part of this agenda relates to Dr. Kumbhar’s new project tentatively titled “India After Bhore - Health Policy and Healthcare Reform in Post-independence India”.

Across India, air pollution offers a stark example of environmental degradation. Large portions of the country, including many major cities, are consistently ranked as having the most polluted air in the world. Yet despite its adverse consequences for public health, opinion surveys suggest air pollution is not prioritized as an important election issue by Indian citizens, even within highly impacted areas like the national capital of Delhi. Why? We test several potential explanations through a major household survey of over 3000 residents across Delhi-NCR.

Amidst calls for urgent climate adaptation, this project dwells in the everyday stories of development, infrastructure and dwelling of marginalized urban residents in Mumbai that are often drowned out by the formalized procedures of expert knowledges of climate change action.