Nitya Rao
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 93630 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Nitya Rao |
| NOMBRES | Nitya |
| APELLIDO | Rao |
| FIRMA | RAO N |
| AFILIACIONES | University of East Anglia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6318-0147 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 80 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 298 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 79 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1996 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Supporting migration as a response to climate risk
Human migration is a prevalent and widely used strategy to deal with emerging risks from climate and environmental change. Yet the reality of migration and its consequences are underrepresented in policies and interventions for adaptation. We outline a framework that proposes relevant normative dimensions to support evaluation of migration-as-adaptation in terms of what makes it successful, for whom, and in what circumstances. We review evidence …
The securitization of the Rohingya in India’s shifting refugee approach
Citizen voice and state response in the context of food system transformations
This paper reviews the dynamic interplay between food activism and state responses, focusing on the diverse ways and strategies used by food movements to advocate for food systems transformation. More so, in a context of growing corporate control in food systems, food activism has been promoting just and sustainable alternatives. State reactions have been evolving, ranging from repression to policy change, to, in some cases, collaboration. Throug…
Male migration and the transformation of gendered agriculture work
Male migration among agriculture-dependent households has emerged as an important livelihood strategy for coping with poverty, food insecurity, climate change, and several other risks and shocks in the Global South. Emerging research on the impacts of male migration on women’s agency, especially in agricultural production and decision-making, paints a one-size-fits-all picture. This paper, through a comparative, qualitative analysis of the implic…
Corporate concentration and power matter for agency in food systems
High levels of corporate concentration and power in agrifood supply chains raise important policy concerns because they can affect food systems in adverse ways. In this paper, we argue that increased corporate concentration and power in food systems has the capacity to undermine people’s agency– that is, their capability to make choices and exercise their voice. We explore three dimensions of the relationship between concentrated corporate power …
Inclusion or Exclusion
Internal migration, nearly four times more than the migration across national boundaries, accounts for the largest human movements in the world. In context of agrarian distress, circular migration between the rural and the urban is a common livelihood trajectory of at least 100 million Indians. It is known that circular migrants face numerous economic and social challenges of survival in the city. This article focuses on gendered experiences and …
Skills to stay
Skill development is considered to be critically important for the eradication of poverty and for social inclusion in the Global South. The Indian government launched broad reforms under the Skill India Mission in 2015 to train 400 million Indians by 2022. However, little is known about the social processes of skill acquisition, especially within the agricultural sector in rural India. In 2020–2021, we conducted work-life course interviews with 6…
Urban and peri-urban agriculture for sustainability and wellbeing
Both visible and invisible
Technological innovations in fisheries have generally been seen to exclude women, exacerbating both their economic marginalization and lack of political voice. Such a view however ignores the complexities underpinning the interface between technologies and social relationships, in particular, those of gender. In this article, we explore the impact of ring seine expansion in Cuddalore, a costal district of Tamil Nadu on the east coast of southern …
Cultivating sustainable and healthy cities
Despite considerable interest in urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) in recent decades, its contributions to urban sustainability and human wellbeing remain contested. This systematic literature review examines the geographical landscape of the peer-reviewed literature on UPA and assesses its reported outcomes on sustainability and wellbeing. Following systematic review protocols, we undertook a two-step literature screening and quality assess…
Engendering Climate Change
This book focuses on the gendered experiences of environmental change across different geographies and social contexts in South Asia and on diverse strategies of adapting to climate variability. The book analyzes how changes in rainfall patterns, floods, droughts, heatwaves and landslides affect those who are directly dependent on the agrarian economy. It examines the socio-economic pressures, including the increase in women's work burdens both i…
Contract farming, ecological change and the transformations of reciprocal gendered social relations in Eastern India
Debates on gender and the commodification of land highlight the loss of land rights, intensification of demands on women's labour, and decline in their decision-making control. Supported by 'extra-economic forces' of religious nationalism (Hindutva), such neoliberal interventions are producing new gender ideologies involving a subtle shift from relations of reciprocity to those of subordination. Using data from fine grained fieldwork in Koraput d…
Well-being and mobility of female-heads of households in a fishing village in South India
This paper focuses on how Female Heads of Households (FHHs) in a village in Cuddalore District, in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, have tried to achieve their various well-being targets and overcome their vulnerabilities through engaging in fish trading and auctioning that in turn involves moving within and outside their village. The study is based on a three-week fieldwork undertaken in April and May 2017, including multiple methods, such as obs…
Destinations Matter
The national lockdown of India announced on March 24th 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, left millions of migrant labourers stranded in their destinations. Thrown out of their informal labour arrangements in cities and industrial centres, unable to return to their villages in the absence of transportation, they were stranded for over a month with no income, improper housing and often lack of food. This paper discusses the experiences of …
Adult learning for nutrition security
National statistics point to the severe problem of hunger and undernutrition within indigenous communities in India. Several state interventions exist, in terms of both supplementary feeding and nutritional literacy, yet not much progress is visible. This paper explores the experiences of a participatory, educational, action research programme on nutrition for indigenous women and men in Eastern India. Spanning a period of three years, it examine…
Gendered vulnerabilities to climate change
Emerging and on-going research indicates that vulnerabilities to impacts of climate change are gendered. Still, policy approaches aimed at strengthening local communities’ adaptive capacity largely fail to recognize the gendered nature of everyday realities and experiences. This paper interrogates some of the emerging evidence in selected semi-arid countries of Africa and Asia from a gender perspective, using water scarcity as an illustrative exa…
Gendered Time, Seasonality, and Nutrition
Some of the key pathways linking agriculture and nutrition run through women’s work, yet the evidence on these links are weak. Using time-use data from two Indian districts, this paper seeks to fill this gap. In principle, women’s agricultural work could have positive and negative implications for nutrition, through increased control over incomes or intensifying work burdens. The emerging evidence points to the nuanced ways in which social identi…
Managing risk, changing aspirations and household dynamics
Semi-arid regions across Africa and Asia are characterized by rapidly changing biophysical regimes, structural vulnerabilities, and increasing livelihood precarity. Gender, class, and caste/ethnic identities and relationships, and the specific social, economic and political power, roles and responsibilities they entail, shape the choices and decisions open to individuals and households in managing the risks they face. Unpacking the multiple, inte…
From abandonment to autonomy
Access to resources, both material and social, are central elements in responding to social and environmental transition, and adapting to change, yet the ways in which such access is negotiated within and across varying household structures is not well understood. In semi-arid Kenya, persistent drought has made male incomes from pastoralism insecure, and contributed to women’s growing engagement with trade, farming and other independent enterpris…
Gender justice and food security
This article contributes to the debates around food and nutrition security from a perspective of gender justice, central to which is the recognition of men and women as having equal rights and entitlements to a life free from hunger and malnutrition. Using both quantitative and qualitative data from the Indian state of Bihar, we assess various elements of gender justice through the functioning of the Public Distribution System, the largest food-b…
Is the Push for Gender Sensitive Research Advancing the SDG Agenda of Leaving No One Behind
Following decades of advocacy, collecting sex-disaggregated data and conducting gender analyses have become an expected aspect of research in development studies. We strongly support this shift, yet it has focused attention upon one manifestation of inequality. We explore five dimensions of inequality, as expressed in health metrics in Ethiopia, to highlight diverse manifestations of inequalities. We call for a broader approach to understanding i…
Women’s agricultural work and nutrition in South Asia
In this systematic review, we aim to examine the impact of women’s work in agriculture on maternal and child nutrition in South Asia. Building on previous reviews supported under the Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA) consortium, and recent published literature, we include findings from new LANSA research. While mapping literature onto the gender-nutrition pathways linking agriculture to nutrition (Kadiyala et al., 2014), …
Global Agendas, Local Norms
This article explores the articulation and framing of unpaid care work and the mobilization around it at two spatial scales, the global and national. For the latter it focuses on three of the largest and most diverse countries in Asia - India, China and Indonesia. While the concept of unpaid care work has received considerable attention in international development discourse, it is rarely found in feminist mobilization and advocacy across these c…
Feminist Mobilization, Claims Making and Policy Change
More than two decades after the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, gender equality policies have not delivered in the ways envisaged. This special cluster of articles seeks to understand why. Women's mobilization and feminist activism was central to the Beijing process and the advocacy that followed, yet their influence on policy processes seems constrained in the current context of global political and economic changes. The ar…
Fertility, Reproduction and Conjugal Loyalty
Much of the literature on Dalits, and Dalit women in particular, focuses either on issues of violence, and subordination based on class, caste and gender, or the relative egalitarianism within Dalit households, which arises out of a context of shared hardship. It leaves out the contradictions and negotiations inherent in their everyday lives, of victimhood alongside the exercise of strategic life choices. In this paper, using qualitative data obt…
Managing risk, changing aspirations and household dynamics
Semi-arid regions across Africa and Asia are characterized by rapidly changing biophysical regimes, structural vulnerabilities, and increasing livelihood precarity. Gender, class, and caste/ethnic identities and relationships, and the specific social, economic and political power, roles and responsibilities they entail, shape the choices and decisions open to individuals and households in managing the risks they face. Unpacking the multiple, inte…
Assets, Agency and Legitimacy
Migration, education and socio‐economic mobility
The primacy of education in development agendas is unquestioned.
Caste, Kinship, and Life Course
This paper reexamines the linkages between women's work, agency, and well-being based on a household survey and in-depth interviews conducted in rural Tamil Nadu in 2009 and questions the prioritization of workforce participation as a path to gender equality. It emphasizes the need to unpack the nature of work performed by and available to women and its social valuation, as well as women's agency, particularly its implications for decision making…
Land rights, gender equality and household food security
From abandonment to autonomy
Access to resources, both material and social, are central elements in responding to social and environmental transition, and adapting to change, yet the ways in which such access is negotiated within and across varying household structures is not well understood. In semi-arid Kenya, persistent drought has made male incomes from pastoralism insecure, and contributed to women’s growing engagement with trade, farming and other independent enterpris…
Marriage, Violence, and Choice
The literature on Dalit women largely deals with issues of violence and oppression based on intersections of class, caste, and gender. Women's bodies, sexuality, and reproductive choices are linked to the ideological hegemony of the caste-gender nexus in India, with marriage and sexual relations playing crucial roles in maintaining caste boundaries. Often, the ways in which women manipulate their multiple, interlinked identities as women, Dalits,…
Aspiring for distinction
Schooling is not a benign process, rather the choice of schooling is often an opportunity for marginalised groups to creatively express particular sets of values in an attempt to gain distinction. Educational attainments carry the potential to open up a range of employment opportunities, but even if these options fail due to structural constraints, particular types of schooling are socially valued for the lifestyles, culture and values they incul…
Corporate concentration and power matter for agency in food systems
High levels of corporate concentration and power in agrifood supply chains raise important policy concerns because they can affect food systems in adverse ways. In this paper, we argue that increased corporate concentration and power in food systems has the capacity to undermine people’s agency– that is, their capability to make choices and exercise their voice. We explore three dimensions of the relationship between concentrated corporate power …
Gendered Time, Seasonality, and Nutrition
Some of the key pathways linking agriculture and nutrition run through women’s work, yet the evidence on these links are weak. Using time-use data from two Indian districts, this paper seeks to fill this gap. In principle, women’s agricultural work could have positive and negative implications for nutrition, through increased control over incomes or intensifying work burdens. The emerging evidence points to the nuanced ways in which social identi…
Custom and the Courts
Based on field research in Dumka district, Jharkhand, this article examines the mechanisms through which women operationalize their rights to land. It questions the polarization of legitimation systems into statutory codes and customary practices, as operating independent of each other, and demonstrates the political and temporal situatedness of 'law', and the processes of hybridization that allow for the actualization of a legal right, by provid…
Migration, mobility and changing power relations
This article, based on empirical research in two villages in Bangladesh, examines the ways in which migration is not a mere response to poverty and family survival, but becomes an instrument to interrogate the power of the traditional elite and contribute to social and status mobility in the local context. By focusing on four key inter-related dimensions of place, work, consumption and marriage, and on the hierarchies embedded within different mi…
Male 'Providers' and Female 'Housewives
Problems of measuring and public recognition of women's work are not merely statistical. This article highlights the co-performance of stereotypical gender roles, where men and women jointly seek to establish the status of women as housewives rather than as farmers and of men as providers, thereby upholding a particular social order and simultaneously reinterpreting the meanings of existing norms to include new realities. Evidence from rural nort…
Contract farming, ecological change and the transformations of reciprocal gendered social relations in Eastern India
Debates on gender and the commodification of land highlight the loss of land rights, intensification of demands on women's labour, and decline in their decision-making control. Supported by 'extra-economic forces' of religious nationalism (Hindutva), such neoliberal interventions are producing new gender ideologies involving a subtle shift from relations of reciprocity to those of subordination. Using data from fine grained fieldwork in Koraput d…
Adult education and indigenous people
Destinations Matter
The national lockdown of India announced on March 24th 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, left millions of migrant labourers stranded in their destinations. Thrown out of their informal labour arrangements in cities and industrial centres, unable to return to their villages in the absence of transportation, they were stranded for over a month with no income, improper housing and often lack of food. This paper discusses the experiences of …
Women’s agricultural work and nutrition in South Asia
In this systematic review, we aim to examine the impact of women’s work in agriculture on maternal and child nutrition in South Asia. Building on previous reviews supported under the Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA) consortium, and recent published literature, we include findings from new LANSA research. While mapping literature onto the gender-nutrition pathways linking agriculture to nutrition (Kadiyala et al., 2014), …
Confronting poverty and educational inequalities
Skills to stay
Skill development is considered to be critically important for the eradication of poverty and for social inclusion in the Global South. The Indian government launched broad reforms under the Skill India Mission in 2015 to train 400 million Indians by 2022. However, little is known about the social processes of skill acquisition, especially within the agricultural sector in rural India. In 2020–2021, we conducted work-life course interviews with 6…
Higher education, learning and citizenship
I Want to Be Respected
In a context of globalization, individual aspirations transcend the local as people seek to move to distant locations to fulfill their own as well as larger social expectations. Formal schooling often does not lead to the acquisition of appropriate knowledge or relevant skills to attaining these aspirations, making students opt for vocational or other specialist skills. Based on empirical research in Bangladesh, this paper explores the meanings o…
Respect, Status and Domestic Work
Well-being and mobility of female-heads of households in a fishing village in South India
This paper focuses on how Female Heads of Households (FHHs) in a village in Cuddalore District, in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, have tried to achieve their various well-being targets and overcome their vulnerabilities through engaging in fish trading and auctioning that in turn involves moving within and outside their village. The study is based on a three-week fieldwork undertaken in April and May 2017, including multiple methods, such as obs…
Kinship Matters
This article discusses the strengthening of kinship ties amongst the Santal community in a village in Jharkhand state in India. The context of progressive marginalization from the state and markets has resulted in the Santals asserting their adivasi identity by recourse to customary institutions as well as rigidifying patrilineal rules of inheritance. While this leads generally to an erosion of women's rights to inherit land, under certain circum…
Is the Push for Gender Sensitive Research Advancing the SDG Agenda of Leaving No One Behind
Following decades of advocacy, collecting sex-disaggregated data and conducting gender analyses have become an expected aspect of research in development studies. We strongly support this shift, yet it has focused attention upon one manifestation of inequality. We explore five dimensions of inequality, as expressed in health metrics in Ethiopia, to highlight diverse manifestations of inequalities. We call for a broader approach to understanding i…
Empowerment through Organisation
Ideology, Power and Resistance in a South Indian Village
L'A. analyse les mecanismes de resistance a l'oppression mobilises par les Dalits dans une communaute rurale du sud de l'Inde. Il analyse l'organisation du pouvoir dans le cadre du systeme des castes et s'interroge sur l'egalite au sein d'une meme caste. Il envisage les strategies de resistance elaborees par les Dalits pour lutter contre les discriminations dont ils sont victimes de la part des castes les plus elevees. Il evoque les strategies de…
Impact of Erratic Rainfall and Mica Mines in a South Indian Village
This paper presents a case of a South Indian village where mica mining made a detrimental effect on agriculture which was already suffering from erratic rain fall Together both the factors have affected the social system in the village so much so that the traditional social relations have dramatically changed The failure of agriculture at times due lo shortage, excess or untimely rains and high labour costs has weakened the dominant caste conside…
Cycling into the Future
Enhancing Women's Mobility in a Forest Economy
This paper, based on a study of three villages in Dumka district, Jharkhand, attempts to under line some of the linkages between transport provisioning, livelihoods and changes in the socioeconomic and environmental context of the transport components of the roles and responsibilities of women and men. Transport needs are largely local in nature-to the fields, forests and mar kets. Distance and time factors seem to play an important role both in …
Labour and Education
The adoption of a comprehensive schools policy by the Wilson government in 1965 aimed to end selection at 11-plus and to bring about a more uniform system of secondary schools. This article traces the development of the comprehensive movement, examines the key debates within the Labour party, and identifies some unintended consequences of a neighbourhood schools system that were overlooked in the framing of Circular 10/65. The article focuses on …
Introduction to the British Association for South Asian Studies annual special issue
This paper discusses the continuing relevance of the British Association of South Asian Studies (BASAS) in maintaining an open field of research, teaching and enquiry in relation to South Asia, despite the growing push towards ‘policy-relevant’ themes' in researching funding. It then introduces the papers in this special issue drawn from the 2004 Annual Conference of BASAS. The underlying thread is an exploration of the everyday power relations, …
Questioning Women's Solidarity
Women's land rights have been on the policy agenda in India for at least the last 20 years. Yet not much has happened on the ground. Why have not women mobilised to claim rights to land? What have been the limits to collective action by women around land rights? Through fieldwork in the Santal Parganas, Jharkhand, India, this article explores these questions. Firstly, the socially embedded nature of land as a resource and the mutuality and interd…
Gender equality in adult education
Adult education and indigenous people
Land rights, gender equality and household food security
Kinship Matters
This article discusses the strengthening of kinship ties amongst the Santal community in a village in Jharkhand state in India. The context of progressive marginalization from the state and markets has resulted in the Santals asserting their adivasi identity by recourse to customary institutions as well as rigidifying patrilineal rules of inheritance. While this leads generally to an erosion of women's rights to inherit land, under certain circum…
Custom and the Courts
Based on field research in Dumka district, Jharkhand, this article examines the mechanisms through which women operationalize their rights to land. It questions the polarization of legitimation systems into statutory codes and customary practices, as operating independent of each other, and demonstrates the political and temporal situatedness of 'law', and the processes of hybridization that allow for the actualization of a legal right, by provid…
Aspiring for distinction
Schooling is not a benign process, rather the choice of schooling is often an opportunity for marginalised groups to creatively express particular sets of values in an attempt to gain distinction. Educational attainments carry the potential to open up a range of employment opportunities, but even if these options fail due to structural constraints, particular types of schooling are socially valued for the lifestyles, culture and values they incul…
Migration, education and socio‐economic mobility
The primacy of education in development agendas is unquestioned.
Respect, Status and Domestic Work
Confronting poverty and educational inequalities
Literacy inequalities and social justice
Comparison, convergence and educational reform
This open issue of the journal is notable insofar as the majority of articles involve studies that compare aspects of education across national borders. Two of the articles involve comparisons of t
The continuing relevance of context for national and global educational policy and practice
The global-local interface
The global-local interface: zones of tension or opportunity?." Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 41(6), pp. 719–720
Quality, diversity and lesson learning in international education
This open issue of Compare brings together articles which address education quality, diversity and comparative lesson learning in different national contexts. They also bring into focus countries i
Breadwinners and Homemakers
The literature on marriage norms and aspirations across societies largely sees the institution as static -- a tool for the assertion of masculinities and subordination of women. The changing meanings of marriage and conjugality in the contemporary context of globalisation have received scant attention. Based on research in rural Bangladesh, this article questions the usefulness of notions of autonomy and dependence in understanding conjugal relat…
Education policy reforms
This open issue of Compare reflects the comparative dimension of the journal including country studies of Egypt, Ghana, Japan, Norway, Spain, and the UK. Collectively the articles range from a focu
Diversity and its challenge to educational systems
The importance of context and the difficulties of transferring both practices and policies across countries and regions, linguistic and cultural groups has been emphasised in much research on Inter
Political science (59 obras) · Sociology (56 obras) · Geography (39 obras) · Economics (35 obras) · Economic growth (29 obras) · Law (26 obras) · Gender Studies (24 obras) · Social science (21 obras) · Politics (20 obras) · Psychology (18 obras)