Uneven human development in India: A social power perspective

In this research we will try to apply the social power perspective to the analysis of unevenness. The social power perspective has three major components it treats basic structure as a central element of the analysis of human development; it understands difference as structural difference and structural inequality, rather than as identity; it understands agency as collective attempts to reconfigure matrices of social power. Of course, all this underlies a specific notion of social power. Without repeating the discussion let briefly mention that we take social power to be analytically distinct from political and economic power, and to represent an alternative form of power mobilized and accessed by those who do not typically have access to the bases from which other forms of power emanate. While the mobilization of social power may have many goals and many trajectories, we are most interested in the mobilization of social power for the redresser of structural inequality