Globalization and Economic Injustice in Modern India

This book is about the informalization of formal-sector jobs in India, that is, the transfer of jobs out of India’s modern industrial sector into an employment sector which is almost wholly unregulated. Rohini Hensman attributes this change to government policies which discriminate in favour of small-scale production and the informal sector and which encourage the relocation of factories to areas with weak union presence, rather than to globalization as such. As she points out, the policy framework which facilitates informalization, and the consequent shifts in employment patterns, both started to develop in the late 1970s and have continued ever since. Thus informalization of employment in Indian industry predates globalization, though the process did speed up in the late 1990s. Hence, primary responsibility for the worsening of employment conditions in Indian industry, attendant on informalization and casualization of (at least partially protected) formal-sector jobs, lies with successive Indian governments, rather than with pressures unleashed by the integration of the Indian economy with global trade and capital flows in the 1990s.

Business · Capital (architecture) · Development economics · Economic growth · Economic policy · Economics · Economy · Globalization · Government (linguistics) · Informal sector · Injustice · Market economy · Political science · Private sector · Relocation · Secondary sector of the economy · Indian Economic and Social Development · World Systems and Global Transformations