‘Freedom from Poverty is Not for Free’: Rural Development and the Microfinance Crisis in Andhra Pradesh,India

Within neoliberal development discourse, the poor are represented as entrepreneurial subjects for whom integration into formalized financial systems can facilitate their escape from poverty. This paper examines how the 2010 microfinance crisis in Andhra Pradesh reveals significant fault lines that underlie this narrative. It argues that the crisis of microfinance in Andhra Pradesh needs to be placed within the context of severe agrarian dislocations stemming from the impact of trade liberalization, drought cycles and a transformation of rural social relations. The contradictions are most strikingly represented in increasing rural differentiation and a generalized crisis of social reproduction among land‐poor farmers and landless labourers. A massive influx of microfinance – driven by both state‐operated programmes and private‐sector institutions leveraged with cross‐border financial flows – found a ready clientele among various agrarian classes seeking to bolster consumption and roll over debt in conditions of significant uncertainty and distress. Yet in banking on this vulnerability, microfinance institutions socialized the contradictions of rural Andhra Pradesh and have ultimately been thrown into limbo through the unleashing of political and social forces unforeseen in neoliberal narratives of agrarian change.     

Explaining the performance of state–community joint forest management in India

This paper seeks to identify and analyze the factors that explain differential outcomes of joint forest management (JFM) in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Factors affecting the performances of JFM communities are analyzed using an ordered logit model. The results indicate that JFM communities are more likely to perform well when they are smaller in size and when forest resources in the JFM community are scarce. Presence of social capital and high value forests are also likely to promote good forest growth. Effective protection of forests is likely to contribute to the growth of forests. JFM communities that were initiated by NGOs are more likely to manage forests effectively than the one initiated by the Forest Department.     

An empirical investigation of consumers’ preferences about tourism services in indian context with special reference to state of Himachal Pradesh

The paper presents the results of a study in Himachal Pradesh, India that assesses the preferences of tourists with reference to the need for information, value for money, security, mode of access, choice offered, and responses to complaints. The results of a conjoint analysis show that tourists attributed the highest importance to security, value for money, and provision of information. Conversely they attribute less importance to complaint responses, choice offered and mode of access. Logistic regression analysis findings provide evidence that socio-demographic variables were important predictor variables for the dependent variable ’utility’. The sample comprised 847 respondents.     

Effect of Internal Marketing on Hotels: Empirical Evidence for Internal Customers

Internal marketing is a concept where firms apply marketing tools to attract and retain the best employees that will later affect business performance in monetary and nonmonetary terms. This article deals with the effect of internal marketing in hotels on their performance, based upon data obtained from India. Researchers identified the constructs of internal marketing: interfunctional coordination and integration, job satisfaction, job security, empowerment, employee motivation, vision of the organization, quality of service, employee development, strategic reward, and senior leadership. Researchers analyzed the effects of these processes on interactive marketing and thereby business performance. This study seeks to help organizations design their own internal marketing plan by outlining the important elements necessary to improve the business performance of hotels.     

Institutional Diversity and Capitalist Transition: The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Arunachal Pradesh, India

This paper contributes a preliminary analysis of the process of agrarian capitalist transition in Arunachal Pradesh, one of the least studied regions of India. Primarily based on information collected through a field survey in eleven villages, the paper seeks to explain the nature and implications of institutional unevenness in the development of capitalism. Institutional diversity is not simply mapped across space, it is also manifested in the simultaneous existence of market and non-market institutions across the means of production within the same village or spatial context. In addition, there is a continuous and complex interaction among these institutions which both shapes and is shaped by this capitalist transition. Primitive accumulation emerges as a continuing characteristic of the on-going agrarian and non-agrarian capitalist transition. Institutional adaptation, continuity and hybridity are as integral to the emergence of the market economy as are the processes of creation of new institutions and demise of others. There is no necessary correspondence between the emerging commercialization of the different productive dimensions of the agrarian economy. These uneven processes are deeply influenced by existing and emerging power relations and by the state. Framed by the Bernstein–Byres debate about the contemporary (ir)relevance of the agrarian question, evidence is presented to justify the conclusion that although the processes at work are far from the classical models of the transition to capitalism, all aspects of the agrarian question remain relevant.     

Perpetuating poverty through exclusion from social programmes: lessons from Andhra Pradesh

ABSTRACT

What factors underlie the exclusion of some poor households from welfare programmes? This article analyses the question through a comparative examination of households’ demographic characteristics, social capital and communities’ spatial (dis)advantage as determinants of enrolment in three social programmes in Andhra Pradesh, India. The main findings indicate that traditionally marginalised demographic groups do not experience programme exclusion significantly more than other groups, but that households’ social-network capital and communities’ spatial advantage increase households’ programme inclusion. The importance of social capital for programme inclusion wanes, however, in spatially more advantaged communities.     

Land for dignity and struggle for identity: Landlordism and caste in a village of south India

The paper is concerned with the contemporary relevance of caste to agrarian capitalism and the relations of dependency and allegiance it fosters in a village of Andhra Pradesh. It deploys the method of village study to examine the two-way interaction between agrarian class and caste relations and the emerging rural-based informal nonfarm economy. It elaborates the continuation of relations of debt, dependency, and political allegiance fostered by landlordism despite significant diversification to nonfarm by landlords and labour and identifies the crucial role of land inequality and the working of ritual hierarchy in locking Dalit caste in land-based relations of dependency. The paper highlights the importance of expanding the definition of landlordism as the use of social power for accumulation by embedding it in the motives and values generated by the Hindu social order. While the new wave of literature focuses attention on global capital and commodity chains to understand differentiation of rural population and ruralities, the paper emphasizes the persistent significance of landholding provincial capital in shaping class/caste relations and rural politics and argues for a course correction in thinking about the processes of globalization and new forms of labour control and stresses the continuing significance of the agrarian question.