How do mass slum resettlement programmes in expanding megacities contribute to the reproduction of urban poverty? Chennai's premier resettlement colony, Kannagi Nagar, housing slum-dwellers evicted from the city since 2000 has integrated itself into the industrial, commercial and software economies of the information technology corridor on unfavourable terms, swelling the supply of unskilled casual workers for local firms.

How institutions frame economic transactions is crucial to the ability of the poor in the informal sector to fi nd their way out of poverty. The literature points to two crucial aspects of the lived reality of the urban informal sector: the network of social relationships and property rights. This article investigates the manner in which the two interact to determine earning opportunities in the urban informal sector. The study is based on a sample of informal sector paanwalas or retail paan shops across Mumbai.

Trends in employment and unemployment in India, as presented by the quinquennial surveys of the National Sample Survey Office for the past decades, have raised many questions for which there are no easy answers. This paper attempts to address some missing links. With the help of time use statistics, it argues that the missing labour force does not imply withdrawal of women (and maybe some men) from the labour market. A large part of the missing labour is missing only from the NSSO data but is very much there in the labour force - though a small part may be due to withdrawal.

Much of the scholarship associated with the “urban turn” in south Asia has focused on the upper middle class or the poor. This study examines social change through the lens of interstitial places and populations. In particular, it focuses on young men who find themselves “in-between” in multiple senses: between youth and adulthood, the rich and poor, and the rural and urban.
This “in-betweenness” shapes how they navigate a changing economic and institutional landscape. It also shows how the forms of enterprise they engage in stitch together the rural and urban in new ways.

The new e-waste rules notified by the government are an important step forward. However, loopholes which allow producers to evade their responsibility and the informal sector to evade environmental and health controls need to be addressed. It is also important to create mass awareness and make it easier for the consumer to dispose e-waste. Policy should encourage cooperation rather than competition between those responsible for disposing e-waste.

Dealing with e-waste must remain the primary responsibility of manufacturers of electronic goods. (Editorial)

This paper analyses employment trends and addresses the problem of creating decent and productive employment in the non-agricultural sector during the first decade of the 21st century. Its primary interest is to examine the transition from informal employment in the unorganised sector towards formal employment in the non-agricultural organised sector. There has been a slight structural shift in employment away from agriculture towards the non-manufacturing sector.

This paper examines the changes in the ways in which villagers have gained access to resources and services over time in what are now “villages in the city” within the city of Guangzhou. It compares and contrasts three periods: the clan-based traditional villages, the commune period and the period since the 1980s (which includes great economic success in many villages).