Hasil Pencarian  ::  Simpan CSV :: Kembali

Abstrak :
Pauperism and pauperization are widespread phenomena in India both in present and past. While a fierce debate continues on how to draw the line separating the poor from the non-poor, there is hardly any discussion on the huge mass, not less than one-fifth of the population, living in destitution. Rural and urban case studies conducted in the state of Gujarat highlight the ordeal of these paupers: the non-labouring poor who never had or have lost their ability to take care of themselves; the footloose labour driven away from the village for lack of work but also driven back home again when they are thrown out of their casual employment; and, finally, an urban underclass redundant to demand, experienced by the better-off as a nuisance and brutally evicted from their slum habitat. A deeply ingrained mindset of social inequality propped up by an economic doctrine which puts a premium on those who have capital and victimizes those without the means required for bare survival. The book is set in a comparative frame that relates todays politics and policies in India to the past condition of the ultra-poor in Victorian England. Rather than generating steady and decently paid jobs, which would redeem the misery of the down and out, the mood of the upper classes resembles the spirit of social Darwinism during the latter half of the 19th century in the global North, when this transition to an urban-industrial future first took place. A residuum identified as the undeserving poor, existed then and was said to be unable as well as unwilling to participate in the trajectory of generalized welfare and progress. The author claims that this ideology of discrimination and exclusion is back with a vengeance the world over and not the least in India.

Abstrak :
Poverty was the predominant paradigm within which science policy was constructed in the late colonial, nationalist, and post-independence eras of India. Whether as critics of its poverty or as architects of measures for its poverty eradication, Indias commentators called on a broad framework of science to both diagnose and treat poverty. Yet, when we think of science in India today, this earlier priority of poverty eradication is hard to find. Poverty eradication as a goal in itself seems to have fallen off Indias scientific agenda. What accounts for this? Has the problem of poverty in India been solved? Or has it become an inconvenient subject alongside the new narratives that frame India as a site of remarkable economic growth? Seeking answers to these questions, the essays in this volume take a distinctive approach to the politics of health in modern India. Insisting that the commodification of health and medicine is fundamentally about economies of bodies, yet irreducible to conventional economic frameworks, the essays pursue the questions of who wins and who loses in Indias health economies. As this problematic transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries, the essays cut across studies of development and demography, research laboratories, and the rural and urban poor, combining the methodologies of anthropologists, sociologists, health economists, science studies and public health scholars, and historians.