Precarity and Development: Production and Labor Processes in the Informal Economy in India
Snehashish Bhattacharya and
Surbhi Kesar
Review of Radical Political Economics, 2020, vol. 52, issue 3, 387-408
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.
Keywords: precarity; informal economy; production and labor processes; non-capitalist; transition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B51 J46 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:reorpe:v:52:y:2020:i:3:p:387-408
DOI: 10.1177/0486613419884150
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