Labouring Lives Industry and Informality in New India

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"This short book tells the grim story of how India, through successive economic regimes, creates very few, highly exploitative and primarily low paying jobs.

Weaving together stories of the lived experience of workers, Archana Aggarwal tells us how this condition, even in advanced sections of manufacturing, creates a situation where workers are so fearful of job loss and victimisation that it intimidates them into not joining a trade union. At a time when workers' rights are being written down, it leaves the reader with the raw question - what might the way forward be?'

Archana Aggarwal has written a book that every student of Indian capitalism will want to read. Brilliantly weaving together economic analysis with ethnographic observation and interviews, she makes a highly complicated phenomenon simple to digest. Abstract categories are given flesh and bone, suffusing the book with great sympathy without sacrificing analytical rigour. A most impressive achievement.

Economics is a puzzling subject because it operates at different levels. At one level, it is 'high theory, increasingly dominated these days by sophisticated mathematical and statistical techniques. It is an area reserved for those with professional training, but if the uninitiated layman or woman hopes to gather a deeper understanding from it about the real world, she would mostly be sadly disappointed. The emperor has no clothes, and the mathematical sophistry often based on absurdly unreal assumptions does not yield fruitful results for understanding real-life happenings. It is dominated by techniques rather than insights and, often worse - a justification of the mythical world of a perfectly functioning market economy. At best only minor blemishes of the market mechanism are discussed, like a failure of the market to function perfectly due to imperfect knowledge. In contrast, more important issues about how economic power is acquired and used to manipulate markets and other institutions of governance are avoided.

Not surprisingly, economic theory at this level has increasingly failed to deliver anything of substance that a non-economist can appreciate, except repeating the message that 'more free market- oriented reforms' and more austerity for government spending are virtues in all situations. Its somewhat precarious respectability as an academic discipline continues today in a patron-client relation. Multilateral agencies fund research in universities and institutes, and large bank and corporations award academic prizes advertized as 'good research' worth emulating. Some well- intentioned professional economists are aware of this state of affairs but can do little to change the system. So, they often tend to engage in empirically oriented research that allows the use of more sophisticated statistical techniques even if the data does not always justify it. This, too, is largely technique-driven empirical research meant for acquiring respectability, not new knowledge. Moreover, there is nothing called pure empirical research without theory in either framing the questions or interpreting the results.

The journey of a manuscript is also the journey of its author, a fragment and a mirror of one's intellectual and political life. I engaged with economics for the first time as an undergraduate student in 1984, hoping that the discipline would enable me to make sense of our society. A few years later, some friends helped me understand that society is more layered and complicated than my young mind initially fathomed. Teachers and mentors at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning (CESP), Jawaharlal Nehru University, provided the tools to understand the scope and the limitations of conventional economics.

Fast forward to the 2000s. I had been teaching economics to undergraduate students for more than a decade. I started Perspectives, an informal research group in Delhi University, along with some like-minded students. We interviewed farmers in Punjab and Maharashtra to understand the agrarian situation and the incidents of farmer suicides. We met workers in the peripheries of metropolitan Delhi to understand how industrial policy impacted them. Over seven years and several summer and winter vacations, this work took us to villages and factories, offices of automobile companies, and initiated conversations with many academics, policymakers and activists. I continued my visits even after the Perspectives experiment ended in 2014. I travelled to Gurgaon, Noida, and Manesar, to the homes of workers and their factories, sometimes with my students and sometimes by myself, to understand the labour process in the manufacturing sector. We also followed up on cases of industrial accidents, union struggles, and so-called sites of labour unrest in the city. Some of these visits were with members of the People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR). I found that even as the years went by and the urban elite in India prospered, the living and working conditions for the majority of workers did not change. I grappled with many questions. What explains the continued poverty of industrial workers? If this was the situation for workers in the most 'modern' sectors of the economy, what could be an alternative trajectory of development? The idea of Labouring Lives was taking shape in an embryonic form. My friends Aunohita Mojumdar and Vivek Chibber convinced me this venture had intellectual merit.

In 2020, as a virus began to wreak havoc on our globalized and interconnected world, two sharply contrasting images became imprinted in our consciousness through television screens and social media. One was the haunting spectre of thousands of migrant labourers walking home to their villages, away from the cities and towns where the lockdowns left them without money, food, or shelter. The forced march home, with many dying on the way, revealed the stark reality of their lives - precarious in the extreme, their earnings so pitiful that few were able to save enough to survive more than a few days at best in the bustling metropolises whose industry relies on their labour. The other image was that of the opposite movement towards the country's capital, with thousands of defiant farmers across India moving towards the seat of the national government to demand a stop to the erosion of their means of livelihood. The farmers showed their staying power by camping on the outskirts of the capital for over a year, their needs met by a strong network of supplies arriving from the farms.

Around these two crises was a divisive debate over the kind of economic reforms needed by the country. In keeping with its policy prerogatives, the central government introduced new laws to bring about reforms in both the industrial and agricultural sectors during the pandemic. Both sets of reforms were touted to spur industry, generate employment, and better the living standards of the people. The introduction of the farm laws brought the farming community to its feet in protest, with reams of comments, analysis, and reportage in the media. On the other hand, the previously existing labour laws were replaced with new labour codes with little resistance and scant debate in the public domain.

**Contents and Sample Pages**