As author of the hugely influential The Economic History of India 1857-1947, Tirthankar Roy has established himself as the leading contemporary economic historian of India. Here, Roy turns his attention to labour and livelihood and the nature of economic change in the Subcontinent. This book covers: economic history of modern India rural labour labour-intensive industrialization women and industrialization. Challenging the prevailing wisdom on Indian economic growth - that it is bound up with Marxian, postcolonial class analysis - Roy formulates a new view. Commercialization, surplus labour and uncertainty are seen as equally important and the end result reconciles the increasingly opposed view of economists and historians.
This book analyses the current conditions of work in the Indian factory sector, and provides a critical analysis of the wage, profit and productivity behaviour in India’s organised manufacturing sector over the last two decades. Examining the specificities of the conditions of industrial workers, it addresses three major questions:/-//-/- What has happened to the relative shares of profits and wages;/-/- How do we explain the levels and changes and;/-/- Are better labour standards antithetical to the project of industrial restructuring?/-//-/The author also examines the problem of industrial restructuring in India within the broader context of power and inequality in the workplace. He argues that even though the existing laws mandate decent labour conditions, India has been unable to implement them because of the minimalist position taken by successive governments./-//-/Providing new and fascinating insights into industrial growth, labour standards and development in the framework of globalisation, this book will interest students and scholars of economics, economic history, political science and sociology, as well as students of management and labour relations.
The academic discussion on labour policy issues whether those of industrial relations, labour market structures, or conditions of work often takes place independently of discussions on macro-economic policies or development strategies. To promote an exploration of these issues, the International Institute for Labour Studies has initiated a comparative review of institutional and developmental patterns in Asia. India's experience, by virtue of its historical continuity and diversity, is a valuable point of departure for the larger exercise.
Bringing together original papers by anthropologists, sociologists and historians, this volume represents a response to the relative neglect in recent sociological research of the social processes and consequences of industrialisation in India. It points to the continued disjunction between the study of industrial labour and the `traditional` concerns of Indian sociology, which tend to emphasise the cultural particularity of India, and advocates a rapprochement between the two.
The global capitalism has entered into a new and distinct phase, wherein liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation (commonly called LPG) is a central theme. Almost every country, particularly the developing countries, are on the agenda of international monopolies and international financial capital which are controlled and regulated by the industrially developed nations. The vulnerable economies all over the world are being forced to liberalise their economies resulting in unfavourable balance of competitive forces on their side. Free trade rules are dismantling the ‘License Raj’ meant for business and industry under the dictate of global corporations. Market forces have been given once again a primacy to make the major economic decisions. “The free trade systems of small producers and poor consumers are being dismantled and being made illegal in order to create free trade systems for big business and global corporations.”1 All these have been the outcome of certain policy initiatives and developments that have taken place at the national and international level especially since the 1980s.
The first major study of the relationship between labour and capital in India's economic development in the early twentieth-century. The author considers the spread of capitalism and the growth of the cotton textile industry.
Comprises 14 essays which discuss, inter alia, industrial productivity, rural non-farm employment, employment security and industrial restructuring, employment creation in segmented labour markets, casualization of labour, landless women workers, the impact of new technology on labour relations, and the impact of structural adjustment on rural poverty.
Historical account of working conditions, hours of work and wages in the textile industry of India shows that such traditions as the caste social structure and rural areas ties have not inhibited rural migration to urban areas districts, or the recruitment of textile workers. Instability encouraged strikes and the creation of trade unions, and forced state regulations on labour administration. Statistical tables. Bibliography pp. 247-257.