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‘Only Gandhi Wrote About Paupers’

by The Daily Eye Team February 22 2016, 4:35 pm Estimated Reading Time: 0 mins, 43 secs

Perhaps no other scholar in the social sciences has studied India’s poor and its informal economy as intensively as Jan Breman. The sheer temporal span of his research is mind-boggling. He began his study in south Gujarat 15 years after India’s Independence — in 1962. And he was in south Gujarat in 2014 as well — that’s more than half a century of field work. In his latest book, On Pauperism In Present and Past, published last month, Professor Breman, 79, argues that what is being ‘Made in India’ right now at an impressive rate are paupers. Professor Emeritus at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, Prof. Breman was in Delhi recently, and in a freewheeling interview discussed, among other things, pauperism, the Gujarat model, and the return of social Darwinism to mainstream discourse.

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