Precarity and development : production and labor processes in the informal economy in India

Bhattacharya, Snehashish and Kesar, Surbhi (2020) Precarity and development : production and labor processes in the informal economy in India. Review of Radical Political Economics. pp. 1-22. ISSN 1552-8502

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Abstract

We take off from the recent critiques of precarity as an emerging global phenomenon to argue that the processes of precarity in the Global North and the Global South need to be analytically distinguished to bring forth their specificities. We further argue that such an analysis challenges the idea of development as transition, as is prevalent in much of the literature. We focus on the informal economy in India to show that the notion of precarity conceptually involves three distinct aspects of production and labor processes—“non-capitalist” petty commodity production (PCP), subcontracted PCP, and informal wage-labor. We argue that these dimensions have their own particularities that have distinct implications for the process of capitalist development in India. We contend that reproduction of these informal spaces during a period of high economic growth unsettles the imaginary of development as transition.

Item Type:	Article
Authors:	Bhattacharya, Snehashish and Kesar, Surbhi
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Precarity, Informal economy, Production and labor processes, Non-capitalist, Transition
Subjects:	Social sciences > Economics
Divisions:	Azim Premji University - Bengaluru > Research Centre > Centre for Sustainable Employment
Full Text Status:	Restricted
Related URLs:	Google Scholar
URI:	http://publications.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/id/eprint/2163
Publisher URL:	https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613419884150

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