The study of industrial labour in post-colonial India—The informal sector: A concluding review

Abstract

Though many had expected that industrialisation would lead India to both a modernisation of production and a universal 'freeing' of labour, this has not happened. Instead new forms of tying labour are emerging. Simultaneously, labour relations are in a process of radical change because, though impoverished labourers may still be tied by debt, tied relations today are very largely economic in content. They are increasingly bereft of the extra- economic control and coercion that rural employers used to exert over their labour forces. For this reason it is argued that, rather than a process of 'deproletarianisation', it is a very slow and uneven process of the self-won emancipation of labour that is under way. These emancipatory processes are greatly endangered by policies that seek to deregulate labour, and for this reason the World Bank's uncritical endorsement of deregulation is found to be deeply flawed.