Download or read book Beyond Kolkata written by Ishita Dey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the politics behind, and the socio-economic and ecological repercussions of, the making of a new township, variously called New Town, Megacity or Jyoti Basu Nagar, in Rajarhat near Kolkata. Conceived by the West Bengal state government in the mid-1990s, in pandering to the vision of urban planners of creating a hi-tech town beyond an unruly, crowded Kolkata, and feeding the hunger of realtors and developers, the city is built on the foundations of coercive, even violent, land acquisition, state largesse and corruption — and at the cost of erasing a self-sufficient subsistence economy and despoiling a fragile environment. Yet, after its completion and departure of construction labour, the new town appears as a necropolis, a ghost city, that belies its promised image of an urban utopia, even as the displaced locals lead a precarious, mobile existence as ‘transit labour’, engaged in odd and informal jobs. Written on the basis of intensive fieldwork, government documents, court records, and chronicles of public protests, this book broadly analyses the politics and economics of urbanisation in the age of post-colonial capitalism, particularly the paradoxical combination of neoliberal and primitive modes of capital accumulation upon which the global emergence of ‘new towns’ is based. Departing from the dominant styles of urban studies that focus on cultural or spatial analysis of cities, the authors show the links between changes in space, technology, political economy, class composition, and forms of urban politics which give concrete shape to a city. It will immensely interest those in sociology, political science, economics, development studies, urban studies, policy and governance studies, and history.
Download or read book Beyond Religion and the Secular written by Wayne Hudson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-17 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deploying a distinctive disaggregative approach to the study of 'religion', this volume shows that spiritual movements with extensive counterfactual beliefs have been much more creative than one might expect. Specifically, Wayne Hudson explores the creativity of six spiritual movements: the Bahá'ís, a Persian movement; Soka Gakkai, a Japanese movement; Ananda Marga and the Brahma Kumaris, two reformed Hindu movements; and two controversial American churches, The Church Universal and Triumphant and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most of these movements have counterintuitive features that have led Western scholars making Enlightenment assumptions to dismiss them as irrational and/or inconsequential. However, this book reveals that these movements have responded to modernity in ways that are creative and practical, resulting in a wide range of social, educational and cultural initiatives. Building on research surrounding the ways in which spiritual movements engage in cultural productions, this book takes the international research in a new direction by exploring the utopian intentionality such cultural productions reveal.
Download or read book Travels Beyond Death written by Dipavali Sen and published by Clever Fox Publishing. This book was released on with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Come, travel with Kushi, from the bed in the morgue where she lies as an unidentified corpse – a rape-and-murder victim. To her childhood and teenage in Kolkata and Rajpur, early marriage days in East Delhi beyond the Yamuna, to a few lovely years in Bangkok, then to the most tortuous decades in a Delhi prison. Travel with her then on the National Highway, going towards Neemrana Fort in Alwar but flowing out in the end in the waters of Garh Ganga in Hapur. Meet Rahul, Kuto, Rakhi Didi, Veena, Tapen, Alex, Shabnam and so many other fellow-travelers. Travel by train, plane, car, taxi and hearse…and then by flowing water.
Download or read book Beyond Kolkata written by Ishita Dey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the politics behind, and the socio-economic and ecological repercussions of, the making of a new township, variously called New Town, Megacity or Jyoti Basu Nagar, in Rajarhat near Kolkata. Conceived by the West Bengal state government in the mid-1990s, in pandering to the vision of urban planners of creating a hi-tech town beyond an unruly, crowded Kolkata, and feeding the hunger of realtors and developers, the city is built on the foundations of coercive, even violent, land acquisition, state largesse and corruption — and at the cost of erasing a self-sufficient subsistence economy and despoiling a fragile environment. Yet, after its completion and departure of construction labour, the new town appears as a necropolis, a ghost city, that belies its promised image of an urban utopia, even as the displaced locals lead a precarious, mobile existence as ‘transit labour’, engaged in odd and informal jobs. Written on the basis of intensive fieldwork, government documents, court records, and chronicles of public protests, this book broadly analyses the politics and economics of urbanisation in the age of post-colonial capitalism, particularly the paradoxical combination of neoliberal and primitive modes of capital accumulation upon which the global emergence of ‘new towns’ is based. Departing from the dominant styles of urban studies that focus on cultural or spatial analysis of cities, the authors show the links between changes in space, technology, political economy, class composition, and forms of urban politics which give concrete shape to a city. It will immensely interest those in sociology, political science, economics, development studies, urban studies, policy and governance studies, and history.
Download or read book West Bengal Beyond the Millennium written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume is the result of an international seminar organized on March 25, 2000 in Calcutta.
Download or read book Strengthening Trade along the Dhaka Kolkata Route written by Asian Development Bank and published by Asian Development Bank. This book was released on 2021-12-01 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The economies of Bangladesh and India are driven by fast-growing bilateral trade. The efficient movement of goods between the two countries is essential to their economic growth. However, inefficient procedures at land crossings, paired with infrastructure constraints on both sides of the border, inflate the time and costs of conducting trade. This study examines some of the key bottlenecks to trade on land between Dhaka and Kolkata, and provides recommendations on how to address them. Reducing traffic congestion along the major routes, and improving facilities and clearance procedures at the border crossings can significantly improve trade between Bangladesh and India, and contribute to more robust economic growth across the South Asia Subregional Economic Cooperation zone as a whole.
Download or read book Unseen City written by Ankhi Mukherjee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-09 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconfiguring the lines between literature and psychoanalysis, this book argues that to alleviate poverty we engage with its psychic life.
Download or read book Beyond Metropolis written by Aprodicio A. Laquian and published by Washington, D.C. : Woodrow Wilson Center Press. This book was released on 2005-05-05 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Metropolis builds on studies conducted during the 1990s under the Centre for Human Settlements at the University of British Columbia.
Download or read book Field Notes from a Waterborne Land written by Parimal Bhattacharya and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 2000s, when the three-decade-long Left Front rule in West Bengal was crumbling, Parimal Bhattacharya began to travel outside the well-trodden urban centres to different parts of the region - from the Sundarbans to tribal Jangalmahal, from the outskirts of Kolkata to villages on the Bangladesh border, from the floodplains of the Hooghly to the forests of Simlipal in neighbouring Odisha. There, he encountered: a woman who was branded a witch because she was listed in the census as literate; an island that vanished famously, only to resurface; a paralysed communist who dreams about the death of a river; a forest community who believe they are descendants of the Harappans; an old millworker and his wife who fight the ghosts of a dead industrial town with laughter; a fisherman uprooted by a river eleven times in twenty years; and many more. This book documents the missing narratives of these 'other' Bengalis, the largely invisible majority beyond the bhadralok that the rest of India knows. Moving between the personal and the political, and between travelogue, journal and memoir, Field Notes from a Waterborne Land takes the reader on a journey across a fascinating land peopled with unforgettable characters.
Download or read book Mega Urbanization in the Global South written by Ayona Datta and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global south is entering an ‘Urban Age’ where, for the first time in history, more people will be living in cities than in the countryside. The logics of this prediction have a dominant framing - rapid urbanization, uncontrolled migration, resource depletion, severe fuel shortages and the breakdown of law and order. We are told that we must be prepared. The solution is simple, they say. Mega-urbanization is an opportunity for economic growth and prosperity. Therefore we must build big, build new and build fast. With contributions from an international range of established and emerging scholars drawing upon real-world examples, Mega-Urbanization in the Global South is the first to use the lens of speed to examine the postcolonial ‘urban revolution’. From the mega-urbanization of Lusaka, to the production of satellite cities in Jakarta, to new cities built from scratch in Masdar, Songdo and Rajarhat, this book argues that speed is now the persistent feature of a range of utopian visions that seek to expedite the production of new cities. These ‘fast cities’ are the enduring images of postcolonial urbanism, which bypass actually existing urbanisms through new power-knowledge coalitions of producing, knowing and governing the city. The book explores three main themes. Part I examines fast cities as new urban utopias which propagate the illusion that they are ‘quick fix’ sustainable solutions to insulate us from future crises. Part II discusses the role of the entrepreneurial state that despite its neoliberalisation is playing a key role in shaping mega-urbanization through laws, policies and brute force. Part III finally delves into how fast cities built by entrepreneurial states actually materialise at the scale of regional urbanization rather than as metropolitan growth. This book explores the contradictions between intended and unintended outcomes of fast cities and points to their fault lines between state sovereignty, capital accumulation and citizenship. It concludes with a vision and manifesto for ‘slow’ and decelerated urbanism. This timely and original book presents urban scholars with the theoretical, empirical and methodological challenges of mega-urbanization in the global south, as well as highlighting new theoretical agendas and empirical analyses that these new forms of city-making bring to the fore.
Download or read book Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal written by Asiatic Society (Kolkata, India) and published by . This book was released on 1897 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Asian Diaspora and Development written by Ajaya K. Sahoo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-31 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook offers an analysis of Asian diaspora and development, and explores the role that immigrants living within diasporic and transnational communities play in the development of their host countries and their homeland. Bringing together an array of interdisciplinary scholars from across the world, the handbook is divided into the following sections: • Development Potential of Asian Diasporas • Diaspora, Homeland, and Development • Gender, Generation, and Identities • Soft Power, Mobilization, and Development • Media, Culture, and Representations. Presenting cutting-edge research on several dimensions of diaspora and development, Routledge Handbook of Asian Diaspora and Development provides a platform for further discussion in the fields of migration studies, diaspora studies, transnational studies, race relations, ethnic studies, gender studies, globalization, Asian studies, and research methods.
Download or read book Employment in the Informal Sector in India written by Ishita Mukhopadhyay and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the transition, transformation and future of the informal sector, informal work and informal workers in India from the perspectives of development economics as well as those of international organisations. Though the informal sector has a long tradition in India, it has been transformed in the wake of neoliberal economic policy. The sector took on new prominence in the 1980s, and has since grown much stronger and established itself as the country’s dominant sector. Several reports on the informal sector appeared during this period, and the status of the sector in India is positioned in the context of this international scenario. The major debate concerns the definition of this sector. While international labour statisticians had suggested a mechanism of definition and measurement of the sector, Indian official statistics took a different approach. The book analytically elaborates the different definitions and measurement controversies in different countries and contextualises the official Indian position. While deliberating on the size, contribution, productivity, and potential of the informal sector, the heterogeneity and decomposition of the sector with respect to these aspects are also suggested. The book develops a political economic interpretation of the historical transition of the informal sector in India, employing heterodox economics as a theoretical basis, with a critical note on standard neoclassical economic analysis. The final part of the book focuses on understanding the development of capitalism in the country under neoliberalism, as that development is crucial to understanding the informal sector in any country, and particularly in India. In the current context, the volume will be of great relevance to researchers, non-government organizations, policy makers and international organisations working on the topic.
Download or read book Sustainable Urban Forms and Communities Urban Geographies of Eastern India written by Lakshmi Sivaramakrishnan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-08 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume discusses the patterns and trends of urbanization in West Bengal - one of the most urbanized states of India in the early part of the 20th Century. It focuses on the emerging urban landscapes of the state and neighbouring areas on building sustainable urban units and sustainable communities. The book explores the changing urban geographies of the emerging towns of the state and discusses how proper governance can help them to change into sustainable urban units. It presents the historical context of urbanization of West Bengal and traces the factors responsible for the urban primacy of the state. It discusses topics such as the development of the spatial patterns and urbanization, spatial trends of urban growth using remote sensing and GIS techniques, well-being and resilience in the urban society, impact of urbanization on the health status of its citizens, and decentralized governance for inclusive and sustainable development of cities. It also focuses on urban growth, land-use change and its impact on the urban environment. Based on empirical research, this book will be useful for students, teachers and researchers of geography, urban geography, urban studies, urban development and planning, regional planning urban sociology, politics, and urban economics. It will also be of interest to geographers, urban planners, community of geographers, professionals engaged in the discipline, and those interested in the urban geography of West Bengal and eastern India.
Download or read book Regional Political Ecologies and Environmental Conflicts in India written by Sarmistha Pattanaik and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-07 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the regional political ecologies (RPEs) of environmental conflicts in India. It explores broadly, landscape-based analyses of political, economic and social issues, which impact environmental changes, challenges and conflicts at local and micro-local levels. The chapters in this volume examine the intervention of different stakeholders in the management of various regional ecological landscapes in India, including forests, rivers, canals, creeks and wetlands. The volume is an interdisciplinary endeavour, weaving together contextual narratives through a combination of approaches from sociology, anthropology, geography, political studies and environmental history. Using such core approaches, the book studies the place-based dynamisms within the regional environmental conflicts in the selected conservation landscapes. It provides empirical reflections on transboundary issues, rural-urban transitions, middle-class environmentalism, identity conflicts, decentralized natural resource management and the role of political institutions. Regional Political Ecologies and Environmental Conflicts in India will be of great interest to students and scholars of Political Ecology and South Asian Environmental Studies.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Planning Megacities in the Global South written by Deden Rukmana and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-06-04 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities are now home to 55% of the world’s population, and that number is rising. Urban populations across the world will continue to grow, including in megacities with populations over ten million. In 2016 there were 31 megacities globally, according to the United Nations’ World Cities Report, with 24 of those cities located in the Global South. That number is expected to rise to 41 by 2030, with all ten new megacities in the Global South where the processes of urbanization are intrinsically distinct from those in the Global North. The Routledge Handbook of Planning Megacities in the Global South provides rigorous comparative analyses, discussing the challenges, processes, best practices, and initiatives of urbanization in Middle America, South America, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. This book is indispensable reading for students and scholars of urban planning, and its significance as a resource will only continue to grow as urbanization reshapes the global population.
Download or read book Understanding Happiness written by Saamdu Chetri and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-04 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive and enriching understanding of the construct of happiness from diverse perspectives. It provides readers with an overview of the issues, problems, and challenges related to well-being and happiness. The book is divided into three sections. It brings together researchers and practitioners from various disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and development studies. Each section includes chapters from leading academicians from across the world. The first section helps the reader understand happiness from a neuroscientific perspective and explores the relationship between happiness and subjective well-being. The second section of the book discusses the importance of building personal resources for happiness from a positive psychology point of view. The last section examines the importance of happiness in the workplace and suggests a sustainable development plan for happiness. It is a must-buy book for individuals nurturing critical thought and searching for a quintessential understanding of happiness. It presents a unique contribution to the literature with its multidisciplinary focus on specific topics.
