Presentation on India to panel discussion on 'Farmers' struggles from India to the US'

I’d like to start with an event which at first sight seems to have nothing to do with the farmers’ struggle, but I’ll explain how it does. After the countrywide lockdown was imposed in the last week of March 2020, life came to a standstill. But by April, there was a massive exodus of migrant workers from towns and cities thoughout India, tens of millions of them, trekking back hundreds of miles to their home villages, mostly on foot, a few on bicycles, a few catching lifts from trucks for part of the way. They encountered searing heat and brutal treatment from the police – beatings, being locked in stadiums converted into open-air prisons, sprayed with chlorine disinfectant – but still they persisted.

So who were these people, and why were they undertaking this journey in the midst of a lockdown? In fact, these were family members of some of the very same people participating in the farmers’ struggle: small and marginal farmers, and especially agricultural labourers. Unable to make a living in their villages, they’d migrated to towns and villages looking for work, and the only employment they’d been able to find was unregulated and extremely exploitative, often through labour contractors, and with absolutely no security. Some of them slept in their workplaces, others got together and rented a small room in a slum, packed together like sardines. When the lockdown was declared, employers suspended production and contractors vanished, often without even paying workers for the work they had already done. Living from hand to mouth with hardly any savings, what could they do? Those who lived at their place of work were booted out at once, those in rented accommodation soon followed. With public transport suspended, they decided to walk to their villages.

But hadn’t they left their villages precisely because they couldn’t make a living there? An interviewer asking this question got this answer: ‘If we’re going to die anyway, we’d rather die with our families at home.’

The Gujarat Model of Development: What Would It Do To The Indian Economy?

 

The cornerstone of Narendra Modi’s and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections is that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has ruined the Indian economy and the BJP led by Modi will make it boom. These claims have been reinforced by corporate adulation for Modi in his ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ summits (Times News Network: 2013) and surveys showing that almost 75% of top corporate CEOs want him to be the PM (NDTV Profit: 2013). How valid are these claims?

India’s economic performance since the 1990s

The economic reforms initiated by the Congress government in the 1990s raised the Gross Domestic Product growth rate from an average of around 3.5% per annum since independence to more than 9% between 2005-06 and 2007-08 (Planning Commission: 2011), before dropping to 6.7% in 2008–2009 as a result of the global financial crisis (Government of India: 2010). Global competition forced manufacturers of products like electrical and electronic goods to improve the quality and reduce the price of their products. Computers, internet access and mobile phones became much more widely available. 

However, neoliberal policies that were part of the changes had serious negative consequences. Privatisation was in many cases accompanied by massive corruption (e.g. the Commonwealth Games and 2G scams), as politicians and bureaucrats received kickbacks from the corporations they favoured. In other cases, even if there were no kickbacks, lack of adequate regulation allowed corporations to make windfall profits, while public sector banks offered them generous loans without exercising due diligence. The campaign by industrialists for the abolition of protective labour laws reached a crescendo during the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime. It stopped when the UPA came to power, but the anti-labour atmosphere had already influenced state labour departments and even the judiciary to such a degree that workers struggling for their rights were seldom successful. 

Labour and Globalisation: Union Responses in India

 Introduction

The first major shock of what subsequently came to be called globalisation in India was the economic liberalisation programme initiated in July 1991. The Congress government headed by Narasimha Rao, faced with a crisis resulting from foreign exchange reserves sufficient for just a fortnight’s imports, undertook some of the measures recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in the late 1980s. The new policy included abolition of licensing procedures for manufacturing investment (which had popularly come to be known as a corruption-ridden ‘license-permit raj’), reduction of the high import tariffs on most goods (but not consumer goods), liberalising terms of entry for foreign investors, and liberalising capital markets (Balasubramanyam and Mahambare, 2001). It would be a mistake to see these changes simply as being imposed on India. Many of them were designed to encourage the expansion of big business after what were perceived as decades of stagnation, for example by removing restrictions on mergers and acquisitions, encouraging businesses to seek finance abroad, and sparking a wave of expansion into new sectors which had either barely developed (e.g. telecom), or had until then been reserved for the public sector (e.g. banking). 

The next milestone was the birth of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on 1 January 1995, with India being a member from the beginning. This involved new pressures, for example to eliminate quantitative restrictions on imports, simplify and reduce tariffs, reduce export constraints, reduce the number of activities reserved for the public sector and small-scale sector, further liberalise the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) regime, and address the fiscal deficit (cf. WTO, 2002). The process of integrating India more closely into the world economy has been more or less continuous since 1991, despite changes of government, and the world economy itself has globalised rapidly during this period.

Women Workers and Neoliberalism

Book review of Women Workers and Globalization: Emergent Contradictions in India, by Indrani Mazumdar, Stree, Kolkata, for Centre for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi, 2007. xxiv + 349 pages.

The bulk of this book consists of four sectoral studies of women workers in Delhi and its satellite townships of Noida and Gurgaon, through a combination of structured questionnaires and individual and group discussions conducted in 2002-2004. 

Review of Globalization, Employment and Income Distribution in Developing Countries

Globalization, Employment and Income Distribution in Developing Countries edited by Eddy Lee and Marco Vivarelli. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2006, xvii + 253 pp., ISBN 0 230 00783 X, £65.00

This book presents the findings of the second stage of a research project funded by the UK Department for International Development and carried out by the International Policy Group of the International Labour Office. The focus of the project was on the impact of trade and investment liberalization on employment, within-country inequality and poverty reduction in developing countries. While the first stage of the project carried out a general worldwide review, this book is based on country studies of Morocco, Ghana, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Nepal.

Trade Unions and Women's Autonomy: Organisational Strategies of Women Workers in India

 

Introduction

 

The labour force in India is as diverse as Indian society itself, divided by gender, religion, caste, region, ethnicity, language and history. In this context, the issue of equality assumes extra importance, yet trade unions have failed to tackle it with the seriousness it deserves. This failure has had an adverse effect on all sections that suffer from discrimination, above all on women, and also on the movement as a whole.

 

This chapter looks at some examples of the ways in which women workers have organised successfully, and tries to assess how far these attempts go towards addressing the issues of discrimination and equality. It adopts a case study approach, looking at six cases from a diversity of locations: The All-India Chemical and Pharmaceutical Employees’ Federation and its activities in Bombay, Maharashtra, in Western India; the Women’s Wing of the All-India Bank Employees’ Association which has branches throughout the country; The Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh and Mahila Mukti Morcha from Madhya Pradesh, Central India; the Navayuga Beedi Karmika Sangam in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, Southern India; Sarba Shanti Ayog and Sasha based in Calcutta, West Bengal, in Eastern India; and SEWA, based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in Western India. The absence of North India is not accidental; this is the region where women face the most brutal violence and oppressive patriarchal control, and organising autonomously is most difficult. I have also included material from a project sponsored by Women Working Worldwide to find out if Codes of Conduct can help women workers in the garment industry, although this cannot count as a case study since the overwhelming majority of the women remain unorganised.

 

The chapter aims to show that while some progress has certainly been made, women and other disadvantaged sections remain marginalised in the labour force, and trade unions still fail to recognise the importance of tackling this issue. Finally, it argues that globalisation perhaps opens up possibilities of using new resources which might aid in the struggle for equality.