The Labouring Poor in India: Patterns of Exploitation, Subordination, and Exclusion

This book is a collection of essays, bound together by two dominant themes that reflect Jan Breman’s deep concern for the socially and economically disadvantaged sections of Indian society. The first theme focuses on rural society in a globalizing India and finds that the earlier marginality of the subaltern class has been perpetuated in spite of enhanced opportunities for employment and livelihood. The second theme explores the rural to urban migration of unskilled and socially underprivileged labour to operate in the informal sector of the economy and the consequent problem of inequality and exploitation. Using these thematic frameworks, the book explains how in different locales throughout India, such situations contribute to the criminalization and communalization of society and politics—phenomena often resulting from the relentless quest of the labouring poor for acceptance and assimilation into more privileged social strata. General readers concerned with the conditions of Indian labour, the poor and the socially disadvantaged, non-governmental organizations and activists, scholars and students of sociology, anthropology, politics, demography and labour studies will also find the volume immensely useful.