A Development Success Story? Low Caste Entrepreneurship and Inequality: An Indian Case Study

Linda Mayoux

Development and Change, 1993, vol. 24, issue 3, 541-568

Abstract: Small‐scale industry development, particularly when targeting disadvantaged groups, has often been promoted as a possible alternative to fundamental change in property relations, and for women as a way of improving their position without direct forms of feminist organization. This article discusses a relatively successful case of small‐scale entrepreneurship development in the silk reeling industry in five villages in South India. In this area, despite the substantial amounts of capital and risk involved, an unusually high number of Scheduled Caste ex‐labourers have managed to become reasonably successful entrepreneurs. Based on the findings of survey and anthropological research conducted over a period of six months between 1989 and 1991 it considers the factors contributing to these cases' success: characteristics of the reeling industry, the nature of government intervention and the socioeconomic and historical context of this particular area. However, as argued in the second half of the article, the upward mobility for some has been dependent on the availability of cheap labour and the manipulation of caste and family loyalties within the disadvantaged groups. Significantly, gender inequalities have remained, despite the potentially powerful position of a skilled female labour force in a situation of increasing labour shortage.

Date: 1993
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