Politics of Development in Pakistan ─ Living Village

Pakistan, sixth most populous country in the world, has not gone through systematic and effective land or agrarian reforms in sixty-three years of its existence. Almost 67 per cent of its 167 million inhabitants still live in rural areas and directly or indirectly rely on agriculture for their livelihood. In spite of centrality of the village in the country’s political-economy there is little by way of theory informed rigorous village studies. As a result, there is abundance of myths about economic, political, and cultural aspects of the life in rural Pakistan

The main objective of the book is to show how the village in Pakistan is intercalated in the grid of national and international capitalism and the impact this feature has on how people work, conduct politics, look at and interact with the world, and the arrival of ‘development’ specialists in rural Pakistan. Instead of viewing the village, as it is often in popular discourse, as a self-sustaining world unto itself, this book brings into fore the processes, manners, and manifestations whereby the village is increasingly becoming intertwined in capillaries of capitalism and its attendant offshoots going by the name of globalization and development.

Haider Nizamani is a visiting research fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Islamabad, Pakistan.