Liberalization: Pro-business or Pro-market?

• State gradually shifting away from social investments

without creating the infrastructures/human resource
capabilities necessary for a strong market economy
• Great inter-regional and inter-state disparities in
capitalist growth with capital scarce regions continuing
to underperform
• The real beneficiaries of liberalization are a small group
of business, political and economic elites
• Except in the case of electoral politics, very little real
democratic participation of India’s masses in creating
pro-market policies
The state and the Public Sector in
Post-colonial India
The Developmentalist State in
Nehruvian India
Key aspects of Nehruvian Socialism
• Planned Economy
• Import Substitution
• Employment generation
• Poverty Alleviation
 The Second Five Year Plan as a form of
Social Engineering
• The emphasis on industrialization in the Second Five Year Plan also
linked to broader goals of modernization – not just through the
infrastructural projects of large dams and steel mills but also
creating a new modern Indian subject free of ‘pre-modern’
irrationalities.
• Thus industrial skill under the IITs for instance was calculated to
provide a scientific bent of mind to India’s working classes,
especially the youth along with making them employable in large
public sector undertakings with advanced production technologies.
• Skill training was also seen as critical for emancipating industrial
labor from its supposedly deep-rooted attachment to the rural,
agricultural economy – the systemic social engineering for
transforming rural peasants to urban industrial proletarians or
waged workers.
 The Growth of Large Public Sector
Undertakings (PSUs)

• Import substitution and lessening dependence on

foreign aids were seen as crucial to post-colonial
growth in India after 1947.
• The non-aligned movement where India was going
to be neither fully socialist like USSR/China nor
fully capitalist like the USA.
• Poverty alleviation and employment generation as
fundamental objectives for PSUs – state’s role in
creating an equitable and equal society through
austerity, anti-consumerism and labor.
 The transformation of the peasantry to
industrial work-force
• Key features:
• Agricultural work is less taxing
• Season and cyclical rather than through out
the year
• Working in small bursts of activity
• Abundant scope for leisure
Key features of modern industrial work
• Time-bound and more rigorous compared to
agricultural labour
• Exacting discipline
• Constant work requiring physical activity
• Fordism/Fordist factory
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
17PkUsTVa7g
 Jonathan Parry’s key arguments:
• The Public Sector Undertaking as a contrast to
the time-bound discipline of the modern
factory
• The over-populated nature of the PSU factory
• (“15 – 20 percent surplus is built into the
manning levels required” (Pg 21)
• Working and shirking as inbuilt into the factory
– modern version of the multiple-shift system
or the joridari system
The history of the Bhilai steel plant
• The emphasis on nation building under the 2nd
Five Year Plan
• Modern public sector factories not merely to
produce steel but a new kind of citizen
• Social Engineering – the ‘melting pot model’
of the new Indian State
• Rational, scientifically trained work-force
 The setting of Bhilai:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU3GLze
VQvg
 The social composition and background of
Bhilai
• Secluded, forested region
• The access to resources such as iron-ore and coal
• The presence of large adivasi population
• The early work-force composed of a large number
of outsiders – non-adivasis/ non-chhattisgarhis
• Over time the transformation of peasant
chhattisgarhis from peasant farmers to industrial
workers
 How do PSUs work?
• Forms of social solidarity
• The importance of team-work and loyalty to
team-members in hazardous forms of work
like in Steel Melting Shops (SMS)
• The social planning of the company town to
help in social cohesion – not segregated in
terms of religious groups or caste affiliations
 The rising ethnic tensions:
• Permanent PSU workers vs. Contractual
workers
• The ethnic frictions between chhattisgarhis
and ‘out-siders’ pertaining to contractual work
• The simultaneous presence of two models of
economic development in the PSU – The
Nehruvian Socialist Model and the Post-
Liberalization Model
 The balancing act of the Indian State
• Profitability vs. social welfare (secured
employment generation)
• The changing industrial and social relations in
the factory as well as in Bhilai due to rising
ethnic tensions
• The situation in the private factories – more
homogenous in ethnic composition
• Less degrees of inter-mixing in terms of caste or
ethnic groups
 From peasants to industrial workers – a
‘natural’ transformation?
• The problems today in post-liberalization India
in appropriating land for industrial growth
• A peasantry refusing to transform?
• The future of industrial manufacturing in India
– ‘make in India’ – a reality or an unfulfilled
dream?
• Who will supply the land and labour?