Mukul Kumar
Biographic Data
| ID | 3696970 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mukul Kumar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mukul |
| FAMILY NAME | Kumar |
| SIGNATURE | KUMAR M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Institute of Rural Management Anand |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8905-8927 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Rethinking fossil fuel divestment: Land, labor, and crises of overaccumulation
Research on fossil fuel divestment has thus far focused on the efficacy of shifting finance away from fossil fuels to decarbonize investment portfolios. Drawing on a comparative analysis of fossil fuel divestment movements across the Asia Pacific, this article instead situates divestment within struggles over land, labor, and crises of overaccumulation. While the US coal industry attempts to expand supply chains in Asia, internationalist fossil f…
How Do Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) Affect National Well-Being? The Contrasting Influence of Mobile Phones and Household Computers
Violent transitions: Towards a political ecology of coal and hydropower in India
The concept of just transition is often defined as a process of including particular kinds of fossil fuel workers in the transition towards low-carbon energy.Missing from such liberal framings of just transitions is an engagement with how the extraction of both fossil fuels and low-carbon energy is contingent upon state violence and the expropriation of Indigenous and frontline communities' lands.In contrast to liberal framings of just transition…
Fossil neoliberalism and its limits: Governing coal in South India
Over the last three decades of neoliberalization, India's fossil fuel infrastructures have been transformed into an archipelago of coal-fired power plants and industrial ports in coastal zones. Drawing upon the case of coal infrastructures sited on the coast of south India, this article tracks processes of what I call "fossil neoliberalism": the ways in which neoliberal modes of governance have transformed the state into an agent of market-based …
Disassembling Coal: Finance Capital, Environmental Law, and the Right to Information in South India
Since the liberalisation of India’s energy sector began in the 1990s, the government has developed several novel techniques to make coal an attractive asset for investors. The pharaonic Ultra Mega Power Plant Project (UMPP) program is one such technique which secures finance capital, land, and environmental clearances for coal‐fired power plants. Drawing upon the analytic of assemblage, this paper tracks how the Cheyyur UMPP, one of the largest p…
Searching for the Middle Path in Microfinance Delivery
Contrary to conventional understanding of microfinance delivery approach as either non-profit or for-profit model of delivery, the paper argues that there exists a middle path. The middle path assembles the scalability of a for-profit approach as well as the client-centredness of a non-profit approach. A community-based microfinance organisation, People’s Rural Education Movement (PREM), operating as a social movement organisation, has been able …
Contemporary relevance of jajmani relations in rural India
Social normativity, housing, and urbanisation in an Indian city
A significant part of urbanisation in India is happening through unregulated or partly regulated trajectories that are either informal or semi-formal in nature, and regulatory authorities have come to terms with them on a piecemeal basis over a period of time. This article contends that what is considered unplanned by regulatory agencies is actually planned by people and facilitated by the normativity surrounding both formal and informal institut…
Erstwhile villages in urban India
In the process of urbanisation villages are becoming parts of cities or towns, and are becoming almost irreversibly transformed as a result. Erstwhile villages, now parts of cities and towns, are on the margins of an urbanising India. They are lagging behind other parts of the cities in terms of receiving basic urban services and infrastructures. Urban development processes should look at the specific issues and concerns of these villages indepen…
A Conversation with Manuel Castells
On October 25, 2013, the Berkeley Planning Journal hosted Professor Manuel Castells in a round-table discussion with doctoral and master’s students from the Department of City and Regional Planning. Professor Castells is a leading expert worldwide in the social sciences. He is Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning and of Sociology at UC Berkeley, where he taught from 1979 to 2003. The Spanish sociologist is a prominent scholar globaliz…
A View of Public Action as Collective Action: Evidence From an Indian Village
A theory of public action will be a sociological one, for it can explain the activities of different individual stakeholders who are both driven by varied motives and interests and are required to come together for achieving some avowedly public objective. On the basis of a review of scholarly literature and three case studies of public action (based on ethnographic fieldwork) in an Indian village, this study observes that public action is far mo…
Poverty and Culture of Daily Life
This article explores the nature of culture and its antecedent value in explaining states of people in poverty. It tries to do it by revisiting the highly critiqued concept of the “culture of poverty”. It argues that culture affects the poor and poverty not in the deterministic way Oscar Lewis is usually understood to have proposed, but in an alternative way. It is the “culture of daily life” that influences the options and choices available to t…
Conversations with Manuel Castells
Manuel Castells is one of the world's best-known social scientists. His work is often compared, in scope and ambition, with that of Marx or Weber. In this text, he explains and expands his work in a series of conversations with British journalist Martin Ince
The influence of institutional arrangements on the progress of privatization: The example of Kazakhstan
Erstwhile villages in urban India
In the process of urbanisation villages are becoming parts of cities or towns, and are becoming almost irreversibly transformed as a result. Erstwhile villages, now parts of cities and towns, are on the margins of an urbanising India. They are lagging behind other parts of the cities in terms of receiving basic urban services and infrastructures. Urban development processes should look at the specific issues and concerns of these villages indepen…
Fossil neoliberalism and its limits: Governing coal in South India
Over the last three decades of neoliberalization, India's fossil fuel infrastructures have been transformed into an archipelago of coal-fired power plants and industrial ports in coastal zones. Drawing upon the case of coal infrastructures sited on the coast of south India, this article tracks processes of what I call "fossil neoliberalism": the ways in which neoliberal modes of governance have transformed the state into an agent of market-based …
Disassembling Coal: Finance Capital, Environmental Law, and the Right to Information in South India
Since the liberalisation of India’s energy sector began in the 1990s, the government has developed several novel techniques to make coal an attractive asset for investors. The pharaonic Ultra Mega Power Plant Project (UMPP) program is one such technique which secures finance capital, land, and environmental clearances for coal‐fired power plants. Drawing upon the analytic of assemblage, this paper tracks how the Cheyyur UMPP, one of the largest p…
Contemporary relevance of jajmani relations in rural India
A View of Public Action as Collective Action: Evidence From an Indian Village
A theory of public action will be a sociological one, for it can explain the activities of different individual stakeholders who are both driven by varied motives and interests and are required to come together for achieving some avowedly public objective. On the basis of a review of scholarly literature and three case studies of public action (based on ethnographic fieldwork) in an Indian village, this study observes that public action is far mo…
Social normativity, housing, and urbanisation in an Indian city
A significant part of urbanisation in India is happening through unregulated or partly regulated trajectories that are either informal or semi-formal in nature, and regulatory authorities have come to terms with them on a piecemeal basis over a period of time. This article contends that what is considered unplanned by regulatory agencies is actually planned by people and facilitated by the normativity surrounding both formal and informal institut…
The influence of institutional arrangements on the progress of privatization: The example of Kazakhstan
Conversations with Manuel Castells
Manuel Castells is one of the world's best-known social scientists. His work is often compared, in scope and ambition, with that of Marx or Weber. In this text, he explains and expands his work in a series of conversations with British journalist Martin Ince
Poverty and Culture of Daily Life
This article explores the nature of culture and its antecedent value in explaining states of people in poverty. It tries to do it by revisiting the highly critiqued concept of the “culture of poverty”. It argues that culture affects the poor and poverty not in the deterministic way Oscar Lewis is usually understood to have proposed, but in an alternative way. It is the “culture of daily life” that influences the options and choices available to t…
A View of Public Action as Collective Action: Evidence From an Indian Village
A theory of public action will be a sociological one, for it can explain the activities of different individual stakeholders who are both driven by varied motives and interests and are required to come together for achieving some avowedly public objective. On the basis of a review of scholarly literature and three case studies of public action (based on ethnographic fieldwork) in an Indian village, this study observes that public action is far mo…
A Conversation with Manuel Castells
On October 25, 2013, the Berkeley Planning Journal hosted Professor Manuel Castells in a round-table discussion with doctoral and master’s students from the Department of City and Regional Planning. Professor Castells is a leading expert worldwide in the social sciences. He is Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning and of Sociology at UC Berkeley, where he taught from 1979 to 2003. The Spanish sociologist is a prominent scholar globaliz…
Erstwhile villages in urban India
In the process of urbanisation villages are becoming parts of cities or towns, and are becoming almost irreversibly transformed as a result. Erstwhile villages, now parts of cities and towns, are on the margins of an urbanising India. They are lagging behind other parts of the cities in terms of receiving basic urban services and infrastructures. Urban development processes should look at the specific issues and concerns of these villages indepen…
Searching for the Middle Path in Microfinance Delivery
Contrary to conventional understanding of microfinance delivery approach as either non-profit or for-profit model of delivery, the paper argues that there exists a middle path. The middle path assembles the scalability of a for-profit approach as well as the client-centredness of a non-profit approach. A community-based microfinance organisation, People’s Rural Education Movement (PREM), operating as a social movement organisation, has been able …
Contemporary relevance of jajmani relations in rural India
Social normativity, housing, and urbanisation in an Indian city
A significant part of urbanisation in India is happening through unregulated or partly regulated trajectories that are either informal or semi-formal in nature, and regulatory authorities have come to terms with them on a piecemeal basis over a period of time. This article contends that what is considered unplanned by regulatory agencies is actually planned by people and facilitated by the normativity surrounding both formal and informal institut…
Disassembling Coal: Finance Capital, Environmental Law, and the Right to Information in South India
Since the liberalisation of India’s energy sector began in the 1990s, the government has developed several novel techniques to make coal an attractive asset for investors. The pharaonic Ultra Mega Power Plant Project (UMPP) program is one such technique which secures finance capital, land, and environmental clearances for coal‐fired power plants. Drawing upon the analytic of assemblage, this paper tracks how the Cheyyur UMPP, one of the largest p…
Fossil neoliberalism and its limits: Governing coal in South India
Over the last three decades of neoliberalization, India's fossil fuel infrastructures have been transformed into an archipelago of coal-fired power plants and industrial ports in coastal zones. Drawing upon the case of coal infrastructures sited on the coast of south India, this article tracks processes of what I call "fossil neoliberalism": the ways in which neoliberal modes of governance have transformed the state into an agent of market-based …
Violent transitions: Towards a political ecology of coal and hydropower in India
The concept of just transition is often defined as a process of including particular kinds of fossil fuel workers in the transition towards low-carbon energy.Missing from such liberal framings of just transitions is an engagement with how the extraction of both fossil fuels and low-carbon energy is contingent upon state violence and the expropriation of Indigenous and frontline communities' lands.In contrast to liberal framings of just transition…
How Do Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) Affect National Well-Being? The Contrasting Influence of Mobile Phones and Household Computers
Rethinking fossil fuel divestment: Land, labor, and crises of overaccumulation
Research on fossil fuel divestment has thus far focused on the efficacy of shifting finance away from fossil fuels to decarbonize investment portfolios. Drawing on a comparative analysis of fossil fuel divestment movements across the Asia Pacific, this article instead situates divestment within struggles over land, labor, and crises of overaccumulation. While the US coal industry attempts to expand supply chains in Asia, internationalist fossil f…
Political science (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Business (5 works) · Economic growth (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Social science (5 works) · Engineering (4 works) · Geography (4 works)