Precarity and Development: Production and Labor Processes in the Informal Economy in India

Bhattacharya, Snehashish; Kesar, Surbhi

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.

Citation

Bhattacharya, S., & Kesar, S. (2020). Precarity and Development: Production and Labor Processes in the Informal Economy in India. Review of Radical Political Economics, 52(3), 387-408. https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613419884150

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 24, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Feb 1, 2020
• Publication Date: Sep 1, 2020
• Deposit Date: Nov 4, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 2, 2120
• Journal: Review of Radical Political Economics
• Print ISSN: 0486-6134
• Electronic ISSN: 1552-8502
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 52
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 387-408
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613419884150
• Publisher URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0486613419884150