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This chapter focuses on Andhra Pradesh. Thanks to colonial-era policies, some parts of Andhra Pradesh started with relatively higher rates of rural electrification than the rest of the country. However, the provision of electricity to the rural sectors made the greatest gains when the political landscape in the state became more competitive starting in the late 1970s. Throughout the 1980s, populist promises made in the context of newly competitive party politics continued to spur electrification and reduce electricity tariffs for farmers. By the 1990s, although the state's chief minister, Chandra Babu Naidu, was widely hailed as India's most private-investor-friendly and reformist political chief, an active farm sector ultimately forced the state to adopt backdoor market reforms. Naidu wagered his political capital on utility privatization, only to have it opposed by the state's influential farming communities that benefited from subsidized electricity.

Chapter 4 considers how publications produced by Andhra Pradesh Tourism in the late 1990s and 2000s weave new narratives from the Buddhist remains of the state. Crafted amid India’s larger (and ongoing) economic reforms, these glossy tourism brochures attempt to stoke domestic and international consumer desire by suggesting that a mystical and transformative version of the past is still present and accessible in Andhra. Although Andhra’s Buddhist sites currently exist in varying states of ruin, these brochures employ a number of different visual and rhetorical devices to pose Andhra as a land of enlightenment. However, “enlightenment” is subject to multiple interpretations, including “enlightenment” as a magical state of altered perceptions, which might be achieved through an encounter with Andhra’s Buddhist remains, or “enlightenment” taking the guise of a responsible state government, one that works to preserve Andhra’s cultural heritage.

This chapter analyses the impact of growth on development in the context the experience of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in south India. It argues that the translation of growth into development is conditioned by the nature of the growth process and the presence of institutions that facilitate development. The record of Karnataka on development is relatively poor compared to that of Andhra Pradesh, though its growth rate is, in general, higher than that of the latter. The chapter attributes this phenomenon to the elitist nature of growth in Karnataka as opposed to the populist nature of growth in Andhra Pradesh.

This chapter presents an account of farmers' suicides in the state of Andhra Pradesh starting in 1996. Based on a survey of several studies, it shows that farmers' distress in the state can be attributed to the increasing fragility of resources, particularly the groundwater resources, as well as unsustainable and inappropriate cropping practices, notably in resource-poor areas. A number of factors were responsible for the agrarian crisis in Andhra Pradesh, including growing input costs, falling farm incomes, increasing dependence on unstable groundwater resources, and volatility of output prices. Another cause was heavy household investment in groundwater, with farmers borrowing from informal sources at high interest rates, causing them to pile up debts. This chapter also discusses the economic reforms in Andhra Pradesh in relation to agriculture, along with institutional retrogression and rural distress.

This chapter examines current forest governance paradigms from the point of view of communities for whom livestock management is an integral component of their livelihoods. It provides a detailed historical analysis of policies and legislations regarding common lands in general and forests in particular. Using the case of Andhra Pradesh, it describes at the customary relationships between pastoral, adivasis and other agricultural communities with the forests and then looks at the recent experience of JFM and its impact on access to forests by livestock. It concludes by exploring the potential of FRA to democratize forest governance and its specific consequence for communities whose livestock rearing practices are anchored on grazing regimes.

Andhra Pradesh’s electoral politics has frequently provided electricity a starring role, largely due to the way that electoral competition between the state’s two main parties (TDP and Congress), first led to flat rate tariffs in 1982, contributing to financial losses, lack of investments, and deteriorating quality of supply. With World Bank support, the TDP (led by Naidu) embarked on reform and restructuring, but the accompanying steep tariff hike led to mass protest and was interpreted as the reason for the TDP’s electoral loss in 2004. Under Congress rule from 2004–11, when free power to farmers was reinstituted, the sector experienced another bout of shortfalls, losses, and growing subsidy, until 2014, when under Naidu’s TDP again, the government has embarked on a stealthier reform effort, focused on new investments in supply, efforts at energy efficiency, as well as signing up for the UDAY scheme. AP illustrates the constraints on reform efforts compounded by inadequate attention to the challenges of political transition.

This chapter examines the implementation and functioning of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in Andhra Pradesh in relation to other states and in the context of politics and policy reforms. It also discusses the role of civil society organisations such as self-help groups in the implementation of the NREGS at the panchayat level, along with the impact of the scheme on specific social groups including Schedule Caste/Scheduled Tribes and other small-marginal farmers. Drawing on the results of household sample surveys conducted in two villages in Medak district of Andhra Pradesh, combined with observations based on field visits made by the author to twelve villages, the chapter evaluates the NREGS as a measure of social protection in Andhra Pradesh in terms of its impact on employment generated, wages and earnings, hunger and food security, agriculture and labour market, migration, and land productivity.

Andhra Pradesh was one of the earliest states to embrace the Special Economic Zone concept, and it boasts one of the highest number of approved SEZ projects in the country. The enthusiasm for SEZs among government and private sector actors in Andhra Pradesh can be partly explained in terms of the transformation of state politics during the 1990s. This chapter adopts a political economy framework to examine the state’s pro-SEZ policy dispensation and to analyse three case studies that reveal the dynamics of popular response to SEZs: the Apache SEZ (Nellore district), the Polepally SEZ (Mahabubnagar district), and the Kakinada SEZ (East Godavari district). Its central finding is that the politics of the anti-SEZ movement is rooted in the state’s recent history of policy reform, its changing agrarian political economy, and the nature and strength of its civil society.

This chapter examines the 1990–1992 installation of a colossal monolithic standing Buddha image in Hussain Sagar Lake in the state capital, Hyderabad. According to the primary patron of this image, former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. T. Rama Rao, this colossal standing Buddha is Hyderabad’s very own Statue of Liberty. Although Hyderabad itself does not have a rich Buddhist heritage, this standing Buddha image not only replicates and aggrandizes standing Buddha images from ancient Andhra but also, through large-scale granite reproductions, reunites in Andhra’s capital city the relief sculptures from the state’s most famous ancient stūpas that now reside in museum collections throughout India and, indeed, the world. Although created to evoke a specific vision of “Andhraness,” the Hussain Sagar Buddha, through the attachment of a curse to this image, functions as a site of resistance to the very ideals that motivated its construction.

What led to the passage of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and the Right to Information (RTI) Act in India? What factors explain Andhra Pradesh’s focus on effective implementation of NREGA and being the only state to implement social audits? The chapter documents how RTI and NREGA were passed due to the mobilization from networked civil society actors, and electoral competition produced a coalition government which made it politically feasible. NREGA became a priority in Andhra Pradesh because of active political support from the powerful chief minister. The implementation benefited from a history of committed bureaucrats at the top who were able to take advantage of their autonomy, and also from the historical mobilization by Dalits for rights. The chapter ends with a description of Andhra Pradesh’s informational architecture that was structured to monitor everyday state actions both from the top down and from the bottom up.

This chapter explains the reasoning behind the choice of the states and summarizes the findings of the three state case studies. We chose Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Gujarat based on the criteria that the states should be reforming, large, at different levels of development, and with records of fast growth. Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh were similar until the mid-1990s, but then the former took off with per capita income and poverty levels greatly diverging in its favor. Visionary leadership of Chief Minister (CM) Chandrababu Naidu played a key role in this transformation. Bihar suffered from neglect and sometimes exploitation by both national and domestic leadership. However, the state turned around when Nitish Kumar became CM in 2005 and systematically addressed law and order and development issues. Finally, Gujarat has had a more consistent history of sustained growth, but it too took a jump under CM Narendra Modi.

This chapter highlights the bold and ambitious reforms that were initiated by Chandrababu Naidu, Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. These reforms led to a rapid economic transformation of the state from the mid-1990s to 2012. The emphasis on investment and growth following liberalization resulted in acceleration in growth and rapid decline in poverty. When one compares the states of Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, which were very similar in terms of rural and urban poverty prior to the reforms, it is evident that post-liberalization the economic performance of the states diverged very dramatically. From being one of the poorest states in the 1990s Andhra Pradesh is became one of the least poor states in 2012. In comparison, Uttar Pradesh has lagged.

The chapter presents the case study and the research design. It presents India with its federal structure as a natural experiment to evaluate the political dynamics of labour market reform. It provides an overview of the labour market in India with its structural and institutional dimensions. This discussion is followed by the subnational comparative model where four states are selected on the basis of their institutional and economic similarities but perceptible variations in the labour market. A detailed analysis of regulations and operation of labour market is presented to substantiate the variations. The selection of the cases is based on the logic of most-alike cases, where Gujarat and Maharashtra represent high growth, high per capita, and high FDI states, while Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal are medium growth, moderate per capita, and moderate FDI states. The chapter concludes with discussion on the limitations of conventional explanations of reform variation and alternative political explanation of negotiated reform.

This chapter asks how a social audit process initiated by a social movement in Rajasthan became part of the state government in Andhra Pradesh. The chapter scrutinizes how the process of patching that built the social audit institution was focused on three distinct goals: recruiting activist auditors who had a commitment to marginalized residents of the state, gaining the trust of workers, and operating within the boundaries of what was politically feasible. One key part of the process—and the patching—was how ambiguity around the definition and function of the social audit process—it is viewed differently by different players—was deliberately engineered as a means of maintaining objectivity. Instead of seeing activists as existing fundamentally outside the state, the chapter highlights the possibilities when activist bureaucrats are able to create institutions that enable space for civil society actors to have a lasting influence.

This chapter addresses the issue of farm profitability specific to Andhra Pradesh, one of the large agricultural states in India. Farmers in general and in Andhra Pradesh in particular are passing through a painful phase with widespread indebtedness and high proportion of farm suicides during the last two decades. What is the cause this crisis? Is it because of low remuneration from crops? Although a large number of studies have attempted to study the possible reasons for this unprecedented crisis, the issue of profit from crop cultivation covering longer period of data and crops has not been studied in detail. Utilizing time series data from eight important crops, chapter 8 examines whether farmers reap any steady profits over time. Further, it also provides an in-depth analysis of how many years farmers were able to harvest profit especially in relation to cost C2 since seventies.