Geopolitics of Chabahar Port for Iran, India and Afghanistan

In January 2016, Iran, India and Afghanistan signed a trilateral economic agreement on developing the Chabahar Port in south-eastern Iran. This project holds immense economic and geopolitical value for both Iran and India. Chabahar, as Iran’s first deep water port, connects it to oceanic trade routes. This helps Iran to mitigate US sanctions and sustain trade relations with neighbours and independent states such as India. For India, Chabahar is the key point of the ‘International North–South Transport Corridor’, an ambitious project connecting India to Central Asia and Europe. The article analyses the geostrategic, economic and trade-related importance of Chabahar port from both Iranian and Indian perspectives. This Iranian–Indian trade co-operation is considered a strategic alternative, if not a rival, to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), whose key point is the Gwadar port in Pakistan, next door to Chabahar.

Access to Nutrition in Odisha

Celebrated as a nutrition champion, Odisha state in India has achieved significant improvements in nutrition of its women and children. The overall progress, however, masks familiar inequities, evidenced in significantly higher levels of stunting, wasting and underweight in children. The article examines access, a key underlying determinant of undernutrition, to two nutrition government schemes of Odisha—the Supplementary Nutrition Programme and Mamata—for the most vulnerable groups in the state’s Angul district. The study identifies limited awareness and lack of proactive disclosure of scheme information, excessive distance from centres that provide the schemes, caste-based power dynamics and weak monitoring institutions as key factors restricting access of specific social groups to these two schemes. The article examines the factors constraining access and considers potential solutions to overcome these bottlenecks in order to provide more effective protection mechanisms.

Bengal Partition Refugees at Sealdah Railway Station, 1950–60

This article focuses on the Sealdah railway station in Calcutta, West Bengal, as a site of refugee ‘settlement’ in the aftermath of British India’s partition. From 1946 to the late 1960s, the platforms of Sealdah remained crowded with Bengali Hindu refugees from East Pakistan. Some refugees stayed a few days, but many stayed for months, even years. Relying on newspaper reports, autobiographical accounts and official archives, this article elaborates how a busy railway station uniquely shaped the experiences of partition refugees. Despite severe infrastructural limitations, the railway platforms of Sealdah provided these refugee residents with certain opportunities. Many preferred to stay at Sealdah instead of moving to any government facility. However, even for the most long-term residents of Sealdah, it remained a temporary home, from where they were either shifted to government camps or themselves found accommodation in and around Calcutta. The article argues that by allowing the refugees to squat on a busy railway platform for months and years, the state recognised a unique right of these refugees, their right to wait, involving at least some agency in the process of resettling.

Mental Health Services in the Northeastern Province of British India: Tezpur Lunatic Asylum, 1876–947

Colonialism in the nineteenth century brought a new ‘space’ for lunatics in British India. The Northeastern province witnessed the establishment of a lunatic asylum in 1876 at Tezpur in present-day Assam. The article explores the historical development of mental health services by the British in this particular region and constructs a history of colonial control of the natives through employing a strict system under the lunatic asylum service. The methods of confinement of inmates, mainly from poor sections of society, and treatment patterns that focussed more on profits and disciplining of inmates, suggest that the asylum was more custodial rather than curative.

Ecoliteracy among Tribals in Eastern India

This article is based on field research investigating levels of ecoliteracy and associating factors among four tribal groups in Jharkhand and West Bengal, involving 360 respondents from the Lodha, Santhal, Asur and Oraon communities. The study revealed low to extremely high levels of ecoliteracy and identified several specific factors as significant predictors of ecoliteracy levels. While gender, occupation and total monthly income of respondents did not influence such levels, the study conclusively indicates that detachment from forest and natural resources is detrimental to the preservation and cultivation of ecoliteracy and that the connection of people and forests requires careful multidimensional attention.

Employment of educated youth in rural Punjab: Amidst Stagnancy and (IM)Mobility

In the context of larger discussions of how education, employment opportunities and social mobility processes intersect, this article presents micro-evidence to interrogate the role of higher education in accessing avenues for mobility regarding employment opportunities for educated youth in India’s rural Punjab. By presenting their career ambitions and trajectories, this fieldwork-based article maps a plethora of dynamics influencing the individual journeys. The article reflects on how social capital, caste and economic marginality affect the career options and mobility potential of these young males and females. The findings reaffirm that caste, compounded by economic inequality, tends to inhibit paths to upward mobility for young people located at the lower end of traditional hierarchies. However, determined efforts by many disadvantaged young rural people to succeed, partly supported by targeted affirmative action programmes, are also showing some remarkable results that offer hope.

Book review: Imre Bangha (Ed.) Tagore. Beyond His Language

Imre Bangha (Ed.) Tagore. Beyond His Language (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2017), xiii + 230 pp.

Book review: Inshah Malik, Muslim Women, Agency and Resistance Politics: The Case of Kashmir

Inshah Malik, Muslim Women, Agency and Resistance Politics: The Case of Kashmir (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 130 pp.

Book review: Sujata Mukherjee, Gender, Medicine, and Society in Colonial India: Women’s Health Care in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Bengal

Sujata Mukherjee, Gender, Medicine, and Society in Colonial India: Women’s Health Care in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017), xxxv + 223 pp.

Book review: Sudhir Chella Rajan, A Social Theory of Corruption: Notes from the Indian Subcontinent

Sudhir Chella Rajan, A Social Theory of Corruption: Notes from the Indian Subcontinent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 384 pp.