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This timely and empathetic but not uncritical policy analysis forcefully argues for an urgent debate within India over the continued need for concessional IDA funding - even as India graduates to middle-income status - to serve the interests of India, particularly of its poor in the lagging states. -Baldev Raj Nayar, Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, McGill University, and author of The Myth of the Shrinking State: Globalization and the State in India
This is an extraordinarily fine-grained, novel and careful studyof Indias fraught relationship with the World Bank. Withoutresorting to polemical claims and assertions, Jason Kirk hasproduced a measured, incisive and cogent assessment of the WorldBanks role in Indias development. -Sumit Ganguly, Professor ofPolitical Science, Director, India Studies Program and RabindranathTagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations, IndianaUniversity, Bloomington
The World Bank needs India more than India needs it. So goes anemerging consensus on both sides of the relationship between theBank and its largest borrower. This book analyzes the politics ofaid and influence, explaining but also challenging this insiderview, while at the same time arguing against the popular perceptionthat the Bank imposes its neoliberal agenda on a retreating Indianstate. The Bank, struggling to remain relevant amid Indias recentrapid growth and expanding access to private capital, has beencaught up in a complex federal politics of economic reform anddevelopment. Indias central government - far from being in retreat- has been the main driver of dramatic changes in the Banksassistance strategy, leading toward a focus at the sub-nationalstate level. Yet the closer the Banks engagement with IndiasStates, the more apparent their political, institutional, anddevelopmental differences become. The Bank has vacillated between afocus States strategy to encourage successfully reforming States,and a lagging States strategy to give special assistance to thoseleft behind by recent growth. The Indian government itself hasencouraged this uncertainty, as its interests have evolved from apolitical strategy of selective support to reformers, to a renewedconcern for regional inequalities. This timely study will be ofinterest to scholars, development practitioners, and engagedobservers of globalization and the nation-state.ISBN - 9789380601472
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Pages : 256
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