Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
This course is designed to interrogate the idea of 'development" with reference to the Indian context. It focuses on the gendered nature and impact of development to understand the assumptions and socio-political consequences of the ‘ideology’ of development. Major landmarks in India’s development project over the past 60 years are reviewed. We examine development paradigms that empowered, privileged and legitimized the state, and negotiated a consensual program for planned development.
Since the Indian case provides a veritable laboratory of "development", it provides insights into ways in which the notion helped articulate, state, nation and economy and thus secured a vision of a collective future destiny. While the middle class saw itself as continuing the nationalist project by managing the development process on behalf of the nation, other groups remained disenfranchised leading to various kinds of discontents and disillusionments. India’s top-down development experiment also allows for examining several shifts in policy, partly in response to critiques from below, growing political assertion by disenfranchised groups, civil society initiatives, and a range of social movements.
The first few lectures introduce the significance of incorporating the gender dimension in all development analyses by critiquing gender-blind development paradigms, which had led to the ‘invisibility of women’ and their consequent marginalization in development processes. As subjects in their own right or as contributors to agrarian production, this invisibility continues to pose challenges. Students will be introduced to some paradoxes of development and those receiving attention in recent years, namely, increasing violence against women and steadily falling sex ratios. Our broad aim in this course will be to situate the discussion each week within historical and on-going social and cultural processes