TIF Collection

Madhav Gadgil's Articles in TIF

Making Forest Conservation Work for Forest Communities

The Forest Rights Act of 2006 was supposed to enable inclusive & sustainable forest management by giving forest-dwelling communities rights to forest resources. Yet, implementation has been poor…
▶19-Dec-2025
Vijay Edlabadkar, Madhav Gadgil

The Importance of Nomadic Pastoralism

Nomadic pastoralism makes positive contributions to the man-made, natural, human and social capital stocks of the country; pastoralists therefore play an important role in Indian society. There are…
▶02-Dec-2024
Madhav Gadgil

Pitting People against Nature

India’s conservation laws, based on pseudoscience, have criminalised people’s defence against marauding wildlife. Democratically-constituted local bodies empowered to protect nature will be a more…
▶08-Dec-2021
Madhav Gadgil

Ecology is for the People

The catastrophes in Kerala in 2018 and 2019 can be a lesson to move away from the paradigm of imposing both development and conservation from above; the state and the people must adopt new ways of…
▶23-Dec-2019
Madhav Gadgil

Gig Work

‘Twenty Rupees for Twenty Minutes’: What I Learned Working in India’s Gig Economy

A researcher becomes a ‘partner’ in a food delivery app for two months. What he experiences and learns from his fellow workers is that in the underbelly of India’s vaunted gig economy are low and…
▶28-Jul-2025
Kasim Saiyyad

Confronting Precarious Work

The precarisation of labour is written into the very logic of platform business models. Ignoring this, and focusing only on social security measures to protect workers, normalises exploitative labour…
▶07-Oct-2020
Kaveri Medappa, Rajorshi Ray, Mohammad Sajjad Hussain

Perils of the Gig Economy

The uncritical tone of the NITI Aayog’s recent report on the gig economy in India and its belief that platformisation will create an inclusive working environment is, at best, credulous, and, at…
▶25-Oct-2022
Asiya Islam, Damni Kain

Big Problems, Small Wins

Despite good intentions, much in the new Rajasthan gig workers act is built on weak foundations, which will make it difficult to implement. This makes it unlikely that the workers will actually get…
▶22-Aug-2023
Sabina Dewan

War

Modi Government's Ill-Conceived Policy on West Asia Jeopardises India’s Interests and Credibility

‘The strategic geometry and security architecture of West Asia will undergo important changes after this war as countries look for new partners. By our unseemly embrace of Israel and post-haste…
▶06-Mar-2026
Srinath Raghavan

Twenty Years of the ‘Global War on Terror’

Matters have come full circle in Afghanistan, the main theatre of the ‘war on terror’. Chaos is festering in Syria, Libya, Yemen & Iraq. The failure of U.S. justice presages an unravelling of the…
▶25-Aug-2021
Sukumar Muralidharan

Strategic Thinking and the Nuclear Garden Path

The recent conflagration between India and Pakistan urges us to reflect once again on the logic of nuclear deterrence and its false assurances of safety. Taking off from the movie “Dr. Strangelove”,…
▶15-May-2025
Jean Drèze

Another Chapter in Afghanistan

Afghanistan is not the exhausted, impoverished, war-weary country the Taliban took over in 1996. Nor are the Taliban the same cohesive force. New aspirations, and pressures from the ground and…
▶01-Sep-2021
Kesava Menon

(Formerly known as) MGNREGA

Essay

The Continuing Relevance of MGNREGA

For more than five years the Government has been lukewarm towards the MGNREGA. Yet, in the midst of the ongoing slowdown this very programme is a potentially effective instrument that it can and…
▶17-Mar-2020
Sudha Narayanan

Costs of Centralisation in MGNREGA

The union government’s desire to ensure uniformity of the Management Information System across the country in overseeing MGNREGA has resulted in workers losing income, employment, and access to…
▶12-Jun-2023
Chakradhar Buddha, Venkata Krishna Kagga

Staking Claim to Entitlements under MGNREGA

There are internal constraints and structural barriers to women’s claim-making under MGNREGA. Supporting more egalitarian decision-making within the village, designing interventions that can help…
▶28-Aug-2024
Kalyani Raghunathan, Katrina Kosec, Jordan Kyle, Sudha Narayanan, Soumyajit Ray

Undermining the Legal Guarantee of MGNREGA: Right, Left, and Centre

Governments of every political dispensation have sought to hollow out India’s rural employment guarantee scheme. Only a mass movement that keeps the vulnerable at its centre can make the MGNREGA what…
▶07-Mar-2022
Sowmya Sivakumar