2014. The politics of dispossession in an Odishan steel town. Contributions to Indian Sociology 48(1): 45-72 (original) (raw)
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The paper looks at the problems of development-induced displacement and resistance movement in Kalinga Nagar Industrial Complex in Odisha, India. While analysing the problems the paper considers some of the important variables such as livelihood risks, past resettlement policy and implementation, increase in consciousness about displacement and consciousness of opportunities and differentiation both among local people and outsider to argue how these factors initiated conflict and mobilized resistance movement against displacement in Kalinga Nagar Industrial Complex. It also argues how differentiation, fragmentation and consciousness of opportunities helped for split and decline of the movement. Based on the theoretical premises of political economy and new social movement and following ethnographic fieldwork the paper broadly explicates the political economy of development and dispossession, causes and emergence of collective mobilization and demands and strategies of resistance movement.
Global Labour Journal
Book Review Jonathan Parry (in collaboration with Ajay T.G.) (2020) 1 Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town. Oxon and New York: Routledge. ISBN 9781138095595 (hardback) 9780367510329 (paperback) 9780203712467 (e-book). 732 pages. £112 (hardback); £29.59 (paperback); £29.59 (e-book). Reviewed by Suravee Nayak, Centre for Development Studies, India Classes of Labour by Jonathan Parry is based on thirty-four months of ethnography in one of Nehru's projects of modernity-the Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP) and its township in central India. This meticulously written monograph of 732 pages covers sixty years of work and social life of industrial labour in Bhilai, between 1955 and 2014, and focuses on the workforces of a public-sector steel plant, a variety of private-sector factories and informal-sector labour. The book under review explores class differentiation in the manual labour force by analysing both shop floors and neighbourhoods in Bhilai. Parry argues that the working class in Bhilai is divided into two distinct classes of labour-naukri (regular BSP workers as labour elites) and kam (contract, temporary and informal-sector workers as the labour class). The labour elites sometimes share a relationship of exploitation against the labour class. The author further argues that the shop floor of the Bhilai Steel Plant, its township and middle-class housing colonies are the "melting pots" of old hierarchies or primordial relations of caste in India. Parry shows us that "class now trumps caste as the dominant axis of inequality" which shapes the contemporary social classes of labour (p. 4). He identifies the weakening not only of the hierarchy of castes, division of labour and interdependence, but also separation between upper and lower castes of the Hindu religion that characterised the "traditional" caste relations in India. The class divide between labour elites and the labour class is analysed and observed not only on the basis of wages, lifestyles and life chances, "but also in kinship and marriage practices, the premium placed on ties with one's village of origin, the significance of caste in daily life and the texture of relations between neighbours, and even in the propensity to suicide" (p. 4). The book is organised into thirteen chapters, including the introduction and conclusion, across four parts-Context, Work, Life and Concluding. The first part of the book (Chapters 1 to 4) sets out the key arguments and provides us with the conceptual basis on which the arguments are framed. It also gives the reader a sense of the wider political economy and the historical processes behind the making of Bhilai township. The author asserts that Bhilai is not among the examples representing a "tragedy of development" but rather a symbol of national integration and modernity. As an industrial monoculture, BSP has a heterogeneous and culturally diverse workforce dominated by migrant workers from different parts
Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal, 2023
A protracted movement emerged in Kashipur in Southern Odisha in 1993 that stalled a bauxite mining project for over 18 years. It went through fragmentations and eventually petered out by the early 2010s. This paper aims to understand how and why the processes of capital accumulation through dispossession cause fragmentation of social movements and their eventual petering out. I analyse the collective strikes that the villagers engaged in during 2008-2010, paralyzing the company's incipient construction work over a tumultuous nine months. Critically engaging with David Harvey's concept of "accumulation by dispossession" (ABD) and Kalyan Sanyal's concept of "jobless growth", I argue that ABD processes entail protracted interaction of extractive capital, bureaucratic structures, ecology, and the movements of subaltern communities with existing divisions. Dispossession processes generate new fissures in which ownership of land or lack of it due to land acquisition becomes the central axis of cleavage, shaping the politics and outcomes of dispossession. I further reveal that 'jobless growth' is unachievable for a company that can push ahead only through the provision of precarious employment and such promises. It is based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2010-2012. Methodologically, it follows Burawoy's (2000) call to "construct perspectives on globalisation from below" through "ethnographic grounding".
T-shirts and Tumblers: caste, dependency and work under neoliberalisation in south India
Contributions to Indian Sociology 48(1): 103-131. , 2014
This article explores the variegated nature of processes of neoliberalisation and their diverse impacts on relations of caste and dependency in rural India. Focusing on the rural hinterland of Tiruppur, a major industrial cluster in Tamil Nadu, south India, the article examines the ways in which neoliberal regimes insert themselves in the region and combine, coexist or clash with existing institutional regimes of power. It documents the highly differentiated and unpredictable effects neoliberalisation has on the lives of villagers who have become directly or indirectly engulfed by its processes, paying particular attention to the uneven impacts on local landscapes of capitalist production and on rural relations of caste and dependency. The article examines rural transformations through the contrasting experiences of Dalits in two villages that became connected to the Tiruppur industry. While in one village, Dalits gained access to the urban industry, in the other, they remained disconnected from urban garment jobs due to persistent relations of debt bondage and unfree labour. It is argued that processes of industrial neoliberalisation do not lead to linear transformations in caste relations and social inequalities. Rather, the relevance and meaning of caste are transformed in uneven, and often even contrasting ways, depending on how particular localities are integrated into wider institutional regimes of power and rule. Processes of neoliberalisation unleash powerful encounters between old structures of power and new regimes of rule, and generate new configurations that defy prediction and expectation.
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History (Durham: Duke University Press), 2019
There has been increasing scholarly attention directed to the systemic exploitation and everyday plight of workers in the nonformal sectors of the economy. This is especially pressing for workers in the globalized South, where the transition from agrarian to urban-industrial neoliberal economies over the last two decades rapidly accelerated conditions of alienation, insecurity, and fragmentation of peer solidarity. In the case of India, the market liberalization reform of the s was a historical watershed. Reforms that promoted liberalization, export, and labor market reregulation led to the mushrooming of the informal sector while informalizing the formal. For labor, these policies meant fewer employer responsibilities toward worker welfare; legal elasticity regarding labor compensation; and most importantly, the gradual erosion of collective mobilizationeither through formal unions or group action -against managerial oversight. Indeed, the conception and identity of a homogenized laboring "class" in the classic Marxian sense needs rethinking in the wake of such neoliberal economic arrangements.
Migrant Informalities of Indian Steel Towns
Environment and Urbanization ASIA, 2017
This article examines the territorialization of migrant informality as a result of specific planning policies in Indian steel cities of Bhilai, Durgapur and Rourkela. Conceived of as ‘temples of modern India’ and built with Soviet, German and British collaboration during the height of the Cold War, these sites internalized a post-colonial, migrant rural workforce, and hoped to forge a singular national identity. Planned around steel mills that transformed the raw iron ore into a ‘metal of the age’, the towns also intended to reform the rural agrarian labour into skilled, modern, urbane technicians, through the design of spaces that they would inhabit. However, these cities—designed with conflicting urban ideologies—excluded access to shelter and livelihood to a vast majority of other migrating residents. Due to their strong planning focus on the ‘ideal’ industrial employee, planners of these cities relegated the non-industrial, informal workforce to the crevices within and around th...
QEH Working Paper Series – QEHWPS200, 2013
The last two decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century witnessed the decline and eventual closure of large scale industries in Indian cities such as Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Kolkata and Kanpur. The closure of large scale industries not only resulted in the dispersal of once organised workforce into the informal sector but also had negative implications for the politics of labour which saw a major decline since the 1970s, and more particularly since the 1980s. Given the closure of large scale industries and the subsequent retrenchment of the workforce what is happening to the politics of the labour that was organised through the trade unions. This question is addressed in this paper by examining the political mobilisation of Mumbai’ ex-millworkers on the rehabilitation question.