Articles by Mukul Kumar

Multiple, overlapping logics of urbanisation are transforming Tamil Nadu's coast. Real estate, infrastructure, tourism, and urban beautification plans are putting unprecedented pressure on the coastal commons. Fisherfolk, whose everyday life and survival is rooted in the commons, are at the centre of these processes of coastal urbanisation. Faced with the prospect of losing access to these spaces, fisherfolk are drawing upon their customary knowledge and new satellite mapping techniques to assert their rights to land and livelihoods.

Pasture development interventions under various schemes of advancement of common pool resources have given mixed results in Rajasthan. Facilitating agencies must be aware of the local dynamics and conflicting interests and should promote village institutions keeping in view local factions and their inclinations. It is not the formally registered or constitutionally acknowledged body, but the underlying structures that make CPR management systems successful while rendering some others unsuccessful.

The discourse of caste, in many instances, cannot be constituted in separation from discourses on several other aspects of the Indian social structure. This paper, however, seeks to understand a relationship of a different order, that between caste and crime which in colonial India came to be linked in socially significant ways. Administrative discourse in colonial India sought to classify castes lower in the hierarchy and aboriginal tribes as criminal tribes and castes. Colonial administrative and metropolitan ideas and practices were thus used to classify certain groups as 'criminal'. Even as the state specified due requirements in the classification of such groups, these were prompted by broader imperatives - the consolidation of the colonial administrative edifice.