Course Description

Since the market reforms of the early 1990s, India has been seen as a development success story by most headline measures. It is touted to soon be the world’s third-largest economy, one of the fastest-growing major economies of the past three decades, including in the post-COVID-19 recovery period, home to a large and expanding middle class, and an increasingly significant player in global trade, technology, and geopolitics. And yet, India is simultaneously home to some of the world’s largest concentrations of poverty, one of the most informalised, migrant labour forces on the planet, a persistent agrarian crisis, and levels of economic inequality that have widened sharply during the same period of rapid growth. How do we make sense of this coexistence? Answering that question requires asking what we mean by development in the first place; whose development counts, and by what measure; how the gains and costs of growth are distributed across classes, castes, genders, and regions; who gets to shape the terms on which development proceeds, and what role law, policy, and political struggle play in shaping those outcomes are questions as important as whether aggregate output or GDP has grown. This course is designed to introduce students to the analytical tools to engage with these contradictions rigorously.

This course is pluralist in its theoretical commitments, drawing on mainstream/orthodox, heterodox, feminist, and anti-caste perspectives — and asking students to evaluate each tradition on its merits. The course takes the students through India’s development story through a historically informed lens, beginning with the foundational theories and concepts that have shaped how development is understood globally — from modernisation theory and dependency theory of the post-war era to the capability and human and sustainable development approach of the 1990s, and the contemporary decolonial critiques of development. Students will learn how to apply these theoretical frameworks to real economic and social problems in India; how to interpret key economic data, including poverty statistics, inequality measures, and labour market indicators; and how to identify the assumptions built into those measures. Students will encounter the perspectives of those most directly shaped by development — informal workers, migrant workers, smallholder farmers, Adivasi communities, migrant labourers — and learn to treat those perspectives as analytically essential rather than anecdotal.

The course is structured in three parts. The first part (Lectures 1–6) builds conceptual foundations: the major theories of capitalism and development, the role of the state and international institutions, and the dynamics of trade and global integration. The second and largest part (Lectures 7–18) applies these frameworks directly to the Indian experience (while also briefly contrasting with its neighbouring countries), examining India’s growth trajectory, poverty and inequality, the informal economy, caste and development, migration, agriculture, land and natural resources, and the manufacturing and services sectors. The third part (Lectures 19–20) examines social movements and political resistance before a concluding lecture that asks students to reflect on what India’s development story reveals about the broader relationship between capitalism, law, and human development.

The course is a standalone elective, open to fourth- and fifth-year LLB students and MPP students. No prior background in economics is assumed. Students with a background in Constitutional Law, Labour Law, or Administrative Law will find productive points of connection, but the course is designed to be accessible to anyone with intellectual curiosity about India’s development and its consequences. The reading list draws on development economics, political economy, agrarian studies, labour studies, and sociology, and includes substantial Indian scholarship alongside international literature. The course combines lectures with seminar-style discussion, structured around leading questions posed at the outset of each session. Pedagogically, the course combines short introductory lectures with seminar-style discussion, close reading of empirical case material, and structured engagement with competing theoretical positions.