Caste and Land Reform from a Heterodox Perspective

This podcast focuses on a once-off graduate course taught by Professors Swaminathan and V.K. Ramachandran in 1999, which was part of the doctoral program in economics at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development and Research (IGIDR) in Goregaon, India. Five students took the course, and in this series, we reflect with the two professors on the importance of this course on our professional development and how the issues we studied have evolved over 25 years. In this episode, I speak with Professor Madhura Swaminathan on inequality, land reform, gender, and caste, focusing on the state of Tamil Nadu.

Madhura Swaminathan is a professor and head of the economic analysis unit at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore.

She has a doctorate in Economics from the University of Oxford and has worked on food security, agriculture, and rural development issues for over 25 years. She has authored ten books and numerous publications, including Weakening Welfare: The Public Distribution of Food in India in 2000 and How Do Small Farmers Fare? Evidence from Village Studies in India in 2017. Her most recent edited book is Women and Work in Rural India (2020). She was a member of the Government of India’s High-Level Panel on Long-Term Food Security, a two-term member of the board of governors of CIP (2002-8), and served on the Committee of Development Policy of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations for the period 2013-2015. Currently, she is a Member of the Kerala Statistical Commission.

Professor Swaminathan is also a founding trustee of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies, a charitable trust established in 2003 and based in Bengaluru, India. Its primary objectives are facilitating and sponsoring multi-disciplinary theoretical and empirical inquiry in agrarian studies in India and elsewhere in less-developed countries. It does so with a wide section of people interested in the agrarian question, including persons associated with academic institutions, members of mass organizations working in the countryside, and other professionals and scholars.