Research and Engagements

ABSTRACT

The development and modernisation of metropolitan cities often disregard the access of urban informal vendors to public spaces. The forceful exclusion of the vendors from utilising public spaces as workplaces by the authorities makes it difficult for them to sustain their livelihoods. In India, about two per cent of an urban city's total population consists of vendors subject to persistent evictions and troubles caused by local government officials and police. In a city like Delhi, informal vendors often negotiate, bribe, and plead with the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), local thana-police and pradhans of the local weekly market to sustain their vending. According to the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), almost 70 per cent of all vendors in the country pay regular bribes to the authorities. This chapter aims to ascertain the impact of local government regulations on urban informal vendors and studies the illegal and illicit nature of penalties to avoid evictions from local weekly markets and the streets of Delhi. According to the National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI), almost 240 registered weekly markets are under three MCDs, while the unofficial count goes above thousand. Also, a large population of local weekly markets (or hafta bazaar) engage in street hawking on non-operational market days. This study collects primary data through a semi-structured questionnaire. Informal vendors engaging in the local weekly market and street vending, pradhans of weekly markets, and MCD officials in Prabhu Bazaar and Daryaganj Bazaar of Delhi are interviewed. This chapter presents two case studies on the Prabhu and Daryaganj markets. The study includes two survey experiment questions on implementing the Street Vendors Act (SVA) 2014 and the bribes paid to local government officials. The chapter concludes by assessing the legality and impact of the ‘regulatory actions’ of the local government. 

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ABSTRACT

The female labour force participation rate (LFPR) in India has been persistently declining and has exhibited an unusual pattern over the years, which deviates from the discourse of a U-shaped relationship between female LFPR and economic growth. The article attempts to provide some empirical foundations for the female LFPR in rural India. Further, it delves into a comprehensive understanding of the effects of different factors like household, social, economic and personal factors, empirically through previous NSSO data sets. The data sets used in the study are from NSSO 50, that is, from 1993-94 to NSSO 66, that is, 2009-10, to ascertain the factors that were significant over the years in determining the female LFPR in rural areas. These variables were tested to gain an understanding of the variations in female labour supply in rural India. Being cognizant and problematising some of the significant factors that affected the female LFPR in the past, the article demands that the state exercise policies beyond its neoliberal framework and the ‘Keynesian welfare-state’ model of ‘superficial’ social security. Methodologically, three models were further created based on the NSSO 66 data set to showcase the perennial discouraged-worker effects among females in LFPR in rural India. The article further empirically tests Jacob Mincer’s theory: ‘substitution effect dominating the income effect’ in the decision of females entering the labour market in rural India and shows empirically how it does not hold in the Indian context, thereby an attempt to debunk the mainstream theory.

JEL Codes: J10, J21, J64, C18

Publisher's version 

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how the story of the progress in capitalist agriculture is a story of robbing of the soil by increasing its dependence on nitrogen-based fertilisers that ruin the fertility of the soil in the long run. The paper shows that the capitalist production, as witnessed through the Agribusiness models in the global South is a direct threat to sustainable agriculture. Primitive accumulation of the Agribusiness model pushes the production/food habits in the global South towards an unexplored territory, involving huge agricultural value systems, uniting the foreign and domestic capital at the cost of subsistence farming.

Keywords: anthropocene, political economy, nitrogen, soil, agribusiness, value chain

ABSTRACT

The dynamics of the labor process in different industries of global South, under the contemporary global capitalist production regime has posed grievous challenges for the wage-labourers, particularly on their workplace safety. The global production networks, particularly in the contemporary Indian automobile sector, have significantly worsened the working conditions and the safety of the workers. Most workers employed in hazardous work are hired contractually and is part of the informal sector, within the formal sector. Under the changing nature of capitalism and production, the capital-labor relations and the conditions of work have undergone several changes, and rapid contractualisation, segmented workforce, and the huge reserve army of labor are a part of it. The study aims to locate the labor question and workplace safety in the mode of production from Fordist to Post-Fordist production regime in the automobile industrial district. It historically traces the mode of production and class formation in the automobile industrial district of Dharuhera-Delhi-Gurugram-Faridabad in the 20th and 21st centuries. A historical account of the [precarious] labor employed in deeper supply chains in an integrated market system of auto-sector brands is brought out. Furthermore, the “safety question” in the labor process in the welfare state model v/s neoliberal model of the global South is theorized and located in the context of the contemporary Indian automobile sector. Through the historiography of labor, the study attempts to map the auto-sector workers’ movements and resistance in the industrial district of Manesar, Gurugram. The data on the historical accounts (20th-21st Cent.) of labor and labor movements is drawn from the archives of trade unions and the Indian government. 

ABSTRACT

The history of labour movements in India finds its successful origin in the multi-nuclei setup of industrial towns and centres— Calcutta, Jamshedpur, Kanpur, and Mumbai. The ‘public presence of labour,’ conceptualised by Prabhu Mohapatra as the ‘political power of the organised labour movement,’ witnessed a sharp decline in contemporary times. For him, the explanation for this decline is the massive rise of the informal sector— rampant informality. The state’s role in constructing labour relations has to be decoded, as it leads to this massive informality— unlike the conventional wisdom of the mainstream development studies scholarship (of miserabilist and evolutionary perspectives). Moulding of the labour relations, thereby facilitating the capital accumulation, is to be understood not merely through the Poulantzasian account of reproduced capitalist relations, but rather through the neo-Gramscian articulation of understanding the nature of ideological hegemony, as well. It is then, precisely then, that class formation and consciousness lead the discourse in understanding the process of capital accumulation. The contemporary Indian state, through this filter, is then not merely reproducing capitalist relations but rather is fundamentally employing the ideological hegemony of capital-centricity in its interventions. And this process is not just for this time but for all times; it is evolving. Therefore, the state’s reproduction of the capitalist relation and ideological hegemony must be considered while studying the interventions in labour relations. The state at this juncture is the external agent regulating the capital-labour relations—- which, in its absence, would appear to be naturally antagonistic.