The Underbelly of the Indian Boom
As India emerges as a major economic power, producing dollar billionaires rising at the rate of 17 per year, more than 800 million Indians eke out a living on less than two dollars a day. This book takes the reader to the underbelly of the Indian boom, an India that is not shining but is struggling to survive. From the Indo-Soviet Bhilai Steel Plant in Chhattisgarh, where an aristocracy of labour is increasingly being replaced by a more vulnerable contract labour force, we move to the banks of the Hooghly River. Here, Norwegian shipping companies exploit a precarious labour force that is as vulnerable to the vagaries of global finance and its crisis as the elderly, especially women and wage-workers, who live in the slums of Chennai. Also in Tamil Nadu, but this time in Tiruppur, we find that the garment and textile industries boom has nurtured new regimes of debt bondage among industrial workers. Though public concern about the vulnerability in which poor people find themselves has resulted in new nation-wide schemes framed in the language of rights, we find in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh that the practical workings of these schemes are dependent on the regional political systems in which they are enmeshed. We end in the belly of the Maoist-inspired Naxalite insurgency, denounced by the Indian government as the countrys greatest security challenge, where the poor are being mobilised to rise against the injustices of the Indian state.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Economy and Society.
Stuart Corbridge is Professor of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, where he is also Deputy Director and Provost. He is the author, with John Harriss and Craig Jeffrey, of India Today: Economy, Politics and Society (2013).
Alpa Shah is Associate Professor (Reader) in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, where she leads a research programme on Inequality and Poverty in India. She is the author of In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India (2010) and is writing a book on the Maoist-inspired Naxalite movement.
The Underbelly of the Indian Boom
Edited by
Stuart Corbridge and Alpa Shah
First published 2015
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Contents
Stuart Corbridge and Alpa Shah
Jonathan Parry
Laura Bear
Barbara Harriss-White, Wendy Olsen, Penny Vera-Sanso and V. Suresh
Grace Carswell and Geert De Neve
Stuart Corbridge and Manoj Srivastava
Alpa Shah
The following chapters were originally published in the Economy and Society, volume 42, issue 3 (August 2013). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:
Chapter 1
Introduction: the underbelly of the Indian boom
Stuart Corbridge and Alpa Shah
Economy and Society, volume 42, issue 3 (August 2013) pp. 335347
Chapter 2
Company and contract labour in a central Indian steel plant
Jonathan Parry
Economy and Society, volume 42, issue 3 (August 2013) pp. 348374
Chapter 3
The antinomies of audit: opacity, instability and charisma in the economic governance of a Hooghly shipyard
Laura Bear
Economy and Society, volume 42, issue 3 (August 2013) pp. 375397
Chapter 4
Multiple shocks and slum household economies in South India
Barbara Harriss-White, Wendy Olsen, Penny Vera-Sanso and V. Suresh
Economy and Society, volume 42, issue 3 (August 2013) pp. 398429
Chapter 5
From field to factory: tracing transformations in bonded labour in the Tiruppur region, Tamil Nadu
Grace Carswell and Geert De Neve
Economy and Society, volume 42, issue 3 (August 2013) pp. 430454
Chapter 6
Mapping the social order by fund flows: the political geography of employment assurance schemes in India
Stuart Corbridge and Manoj Srivastava
Economy and Society, volume 42, issue 3 (August 2013) pp. 455479
Chapter 7
The intimacy of insurgency: beyond coercion, greed or grievance in Maoist India
Alpa Shah
Economy and Society, volume 42, issue 3 (August 2013) pp. 480506
Laura Bear is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. She is the author of two books, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy and the Intimate Historical Self (2007) and The Jadu House: An Intimate History of Anglo-India (2000). She has also recently edited a journal special issue on the theme of Doubt, Conflict and Mediation: Anthropology of Modern Time (forthcoming Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2014). On the basis of her recent field-work on the Hooghly she has made five films in collaboration with river workers.
Grace Carswell is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Sussex, UK. Her research interests include rural livelihoods and agricultural change. After an initial research focus on Eastern Africa, she has recently shifted her attention to southern India, carrying out research on the differentiated impacts of enhanced integration in the global economy on rural households and ensuing transformations in rural social relations. She is the author of Cultivating Success in Uganda (2007).
Stuart Corbridge is Professor of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, where he is also Deputy Director and Provost. He is the author, with John Harriss and Craig Jeffrey, of
