Atiyab Sultan

Her webpage at: Centre for History and Economics: Atiyab Sultan

Working on joint paper: Flawed Theories of Development and Their Harmful Effects.

Investigating the Relationship between Financial Development and Inequality:

An Empirical Analysis, M.Phil. Thesis:

Abstract. This paper studies the relationship between financial development and inequality using a two-tiered approach. In the first stage, new measures of financial access and usage are generated, and it is seen that increased access to the formal financial sector is associated with reduced inequality across countries. In the next stage, a longitudinal analysis is carried out using data from Singapore 1964-2002. Employing the Pesaran, Shin and Smith technique for estimating Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag models, a time-series analysis is conducted to uncover the long-run relationship between financial intermediation and inequality. The results support theories of the „intensive margin‟ which suggest that financial development benefits rich and privileged groups in society disproportionately due to their greater access to financial resources and incentives during and after a period of financial reform.

More Material on FINANCE & INCOME INEQUALITY

The Mirror and the Lamp: Colonial Educational Reform in 19^th Century Punjab

Atiyab Sultan

Recently, education in colonial India has generated considerable and varied academic interest. Bayly’s seminal work on knowledge and information gathering extended the discussion on knowledge systems in India beyond the cabinet and classroom while Viswanathan’s analysed the use of literature to advance imperial political and religious aims. Other scholars like Minault, Kumar, Allender, Whitehead and Seth critically engaged with female education and social reform, the political economy of education, the rule of missionaries and the social and political historiography of education respectively. A critical lacuna that remains, however, is a searching look at the indigenous system of education in the subcontinent and its fate at the hands of colonialism. This paper attempts to fill the gap by evoking a description of the system using colonial sources and describes the unfortunate impact of colonialism on it. Simultaneously, the disappointment and disillusionment that met British efforts to achieve mass literacy are also charted and lessons for educational policy and reform today are then drawn from this historical episode. For a more focussed discussion, attention is restricted to the province of Punjab, at that time one of the largest provinces of British India, spanning territory from Delhi to Peshawar.

The paper is structured as follows: a brief look is taken at the larger policy debates among British policymakers at the time to give the relevant intellectual framework in which reform took place in the Punjab. The particularities in the province are then studied in closer detail using the work of G.W. Leitner, a renowned orientalist and linguist of the time, and government papers and reports. The paper concludes with some recommendations for policy reform in the region today that emanate from this engagement.