Rajesh Veeraraghavan, "Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Reform in India" (Oxford UP, 2022)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Apr 11, 2023 · 1h 7m

Rajesh Veeraraghavan’s Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India (Oxford University Press, 2022) offers the first ethnographically grounded perspective on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005), which was promulgated as a welfare oriented ‘right to work’ scheme by the Indian Parliament at the recommendation of civil society organizations and development economists like Jean Dréze. The book presents a granular case study of the implementation of the scheme in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, and more specifically, the process…