Deindustrialization and Economic Restructuring in Post-Reform India

Indranil Chakraborty is a faculty member at the Lawrence Kinlin School of Business, Fanshawe College in Canada, and serves as a research associate with "Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time" (DEPOT) at Concordia University. Previously, he was a journalist for The Financial Express and The Indian Express. He earned a PhD in Information and Media Studies from Western University and held a Horizon postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of History at Concordia University. His interdisciplinary research investigates the intersection of Political Economy, Information, and Media.Steven High is Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal. He has published a number of books and articles in deindustrialization studies. He is currently the principal investigator of the major transnational research project "Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time" (DEPOT), which examines the political ramifications of industrial closures in North America and Europe with points of comparison in other parts of the world. This volume is an example of this effort to globalize this field of research.

• Introduction 1. The role of the state in industrial promotion and its implications for industrial geography: a 20th-century history of Bangalore 2. Firm size and employment growth in India’s manufacturing sector in the 21st century 3. The Interplay of Labour Law reform and political ideologies and impact on industrialization: A study from India 4. Industrial Impasse in West Bengal: Towards an Explanation 5. Industrialisation and Primitive Accumulation by Exploitation of Adivasi Migrant Labour in Gujarat 6. The Twin Realities of Indian Platform and Industrial Capitalism: A Study of Migrant Workers in the National Capital Region (NCR) 7. Deindustrialisation in the Global South: A Case Study of the Software Service Sector and its Workers in Thiruvananthapuram City, India 8. The story of Bata in Batanagar: From Labour welfarism to Precarity 9. Impacts of the digital platform ecosystem on marginalized handicraft microentrepreneurs in India 10. Economic Resilience and Women’s Empowerment in India: A Post-Polanyian Perspective. Conclusion.

“An excellent account from all perspectives, labor laws, geography, political trajectories, on the eventual outcomes on Industrialization and on labor as seen in various Indian states, over a spectrum of industries both emerging software services to the earlier profitable textile industries. This book is a welcome contrast to the current narrative that all that happened with reforms in the recent years had a positive impact” – Shantanu Gupta, Professor, XLRI, Jamshedpur“This book places the somewhat different Indian experience of deindustrialization in the backdrop of the deindustrialization in the global north. This study is interesting and educative at the same time for people interested in studying about the complex web of forces that determine this process. Whereas during the last quarter of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the deindustrialization in the global north triggered a radical restructuring of the international division of labour in those countries, in India, this process triggered relocation of manufacturing in small and medium factories, a phenomenal growth in the service sector, including IT. This book gives a picture of how de-industrialization and re-industrialization across the globe is intertwined with each other and how India is placed in this entire picture. The more interesting and nuanced part is the story of changes in the conditions of labourers across the globe and how their interests are often diametrically opposite between global north and global south. In a sense, it is a work of an epic proportions to understand the socio-economic and political issues connected with the waves of deindustrialization and reindustrialization affecting every part of the globe and the attendant changes in the labour scenario” – Santanu Mitra, Senior Economic Advisor, Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Indian Economic Service, Govt of India.“This book makes a vital contribution to the global study of deindustrialization. For too long, scholars seeking to understand the causes and consequences of industrial closures have laboured in their respective national and hemispheric siloes, leading to – especially in the Global North – a teleological narrative of capital flight and decline that has underestimated the dynamic nature of shifts in capitalist modes of accumulation. Here, the Global South is moved from nebulous, generic “offshore” to centre stage, as the volume’s interdisciplinary study of economic restructuring in the Indian context reminds us that the constant push-pull tension of deindustrialization and reindustrialization, occurring at once nationally and transnationally, is subject not only to “iron” laws of value but contingent and interconnected social forces like imperialism and resistance, state structures and forms of governance, and local corporate culture.” – Fred Burrill, Assistant Professor of Historical Studies, University of New BrunswickDeindustrialization and Economic Restructuring in Post-Reform India provides fascinating insights into simultaneous processes of industrialization, re-industrialization and deindustrialization in a country that, for a number of years now, has had 6 – 7% growth rates and is the fourth largest country in terms of its GDP today. It asks pertinent questions about the many interconnections of economic restructuring between the global north and the global south. Underlining that these are not simple geographical terms of analysis, the authors in this pathbreaking collection show how complex the social and economic processes are that we associate both with industrialization and deindustrialization. Having long been exclusively obsessed with the industrialized global north, this book emphasizes the need to integrate perspectives from the global south more firmly into global research agendas. All scholars in deindustrialization studies but also those in economics, sociology and history will find much food for thought in this sustained reflection on how a variety of ‘spatial fixes’ have led to changes in our changed perception of cores and peripheries." – Stefan Berger, Professor, Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany.