Mumbai / Bombay

Majoritarian Neoliberalism, Informality, Resistance, and Wellbeing

Sujata Patel, D. Parthasarathy, George Jose, Sujata Patel, D. Parthasarathy, George Jose

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032276724
• eBook ISBN: 9781000595000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Social Sciences

Mumbai / Bombay is a quintessential urban expression which represents the questions and puzzles related to Indian urbanity. This book traces the various ways through which majoritarianism and neoliberal capitalist accumulation has reorganised Bombay or Mumbai in India.

The book assesses Mumbai's present trajectories and processes as being embedded in its recent past. It looks at these changes by exploring work and labour; health and education; spatial planning and infrastructural development; politics and identity; and shows how financialisation, land speculation, deregulation, and informality have impacted the city's culture and everyday living. The contributors to this volume analyse the consequences of these changes for women and men across ages, as they live their material and cultural lives; evaluate the role of the changing nature of work, urban infrastructure, and planning; determine its outcome for public health and education; and take a measure of its manifestation in the field of arts and culture. The volume explores the processes that reorient these changes, the socio-spatial and political implications of these on the inhabitants of the city, and the resistance and response to marginalisation.

This interdisciplinary volume will interest students and researchers of economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, public policy, development studies, and urban studies. It will also be useful to urban practitioners, planners, bureaucrats, activists, and general readers.

Part I Work and Labour Deregulation and Restructuring

1 Informality, missing markets, and political organisation Case study of the Shiv Sena

Neeraj Hatekar

DOI: 10.4324/9781003293651-3

Mumbai has experienced large-scale de-industrialisation since the mid-1980s. In addition, the processes of economic liberalisation since 1991 have also shifted the relationships between capital, labour, and the state. Correspondingly, there has been a process of informalisation of labour and the growth of the service sector. How does one conceptualise a process of capitalist development without invoking physical capital?

Section 1 of the chapter argues that informalisation is associated with forms of social relationships based on social capital and asymmetry of power that are structured within the context of appropriation of value and redistributing it so as to reproduce themselves. The state and other urban actors have reconfigured their relationship to the city and in particular, to conceptions of urban space. This section draws upon data from NSSO surveys, other scholar’s work on labour markets in Mumbai, and our own primary data-based research that has been previously published to establish its main conclusions. The basic argument of this section is that economies of cities like Mumbai depend critically on provision of informal services for which formal markets do not exist. These services are provided by nurturing a set of formal and informal social relationships that are embedded in a mix of rent-seeking activities and forms of social capital. Formal political parties develop around these social relationships and give them a much-needed formal scaffolding. Political power is channelised through this structure and parties become routes of collecting, distributing, and redistributing economic surplus from the activities that they seek to control and often dominate. Thus, political parties are the channels through which the economy of the city is regulated and reproduced. Formal political organisation in a city like Mumbai is therefore organically linked to its economy. Obviously, large-scale changes in the economy require the parties to reinvent their internal functioning in order to cope with the new context. Parties which manage this more successfully than others become the dominant players in the larger political economy of the city. The Shiv Sena, a political party that has been intertwined with the economy of Mumbai for more than half a century, is a good example of the argument made in this chapter.

Section 2 of the chapter therefore examines the rise and transitions in the political strategies of the Shiv Sena. Though there is a great deal of extant scholarship on the Sena, this chapter fills two critical gaps. The first is that most of the scholarly work on the Shiv Sena with the exception of Bedi (2016) and Akolkar (2014) is at least a decade old. The economy of the city has seen major changes since the last decade. Many watershed moments of the 2000s have now been consolidated and their effects are being felt in the political economy of Mumbai. The changes are too fast paced to be encompassed by narratives even as relatively recent as Akolkar (2014). Since the publication of Akolkar’s work, the Shiv Sena came back to power in Maharashtra first in an alliance with the BJP in 2014. In 2019, the long-term alliance, forged since 1985, was snapped on the apparently flimsy excuse of backtracking on sharing the Chief Ministerial position, and now the Sena is in power in the state, sharing it with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party, its erstwhile foes. Understanding the evolution of the political economy of the city is therefore an almost real-time exercise, given the fluidity of its nature. Correspondingly, despite excellent work by previous scholars, the categories through which we understand the city’s political economy also need to be continuously re-evaluated.

Joshi (1970) situates the Shiv Sena’s growth as a political party in pervasive importance of “primordial” sentiments in a modern sector of the nation as well as highlighting the relevance of the local against the “national” concerns in India’s urban sphere. Morkhandikar (1967) too sees the growth of the Sena as sub-nation trying to assert its identity on the basis of history and language. Gupta (1980) and Katzenstein (1973) examine the Shiv Sena predominantly as a nativist party. Katzenstein (1977) focusses on the Sena’s strategic mobilisation of youth for whom a feeling of belongingness and the exhilaration of being involved was seen to be more important compared to a coherent ideology or material incentives. Heuze (1995) focusses on the Shiv Sena’s image as a national Hindu party. Lele (1995) focusses on the diverse ways in which the Shiv Sena’s cultural agenda has served to divert attention from unchecked and polarising capitalist development and its opportunistic alliances. Palshikar (2004) examines the dynamics of the political context of the Shiv Sena and its organisational structure. Our chapter differs from the existing literature in that we argue that strategies of political actors need to be situated firmly within the structure of production and reproduction through specific kinds of social relationships that develop for appropriation and redistribution of economic value in the city. This aspect has not been adequately emphasised in the existing literature. Our interpretation of the Shiv Sena’ politics differs significantly from interpretations that see it as primarily a Hindutva-based communal or regional chauvinistic political party. We situate it as an organisation that provides critical conduits for the flow of economic value as it circulates to produce and reproduce the system of social relationships that are associated with a neo-liberal, de-industrialised, informally organised capitalist city.

Section 1

Increasing informalisation of the city's economy and the changing employment structure

One of the major stylised facts about economic experience in India has been the increasing share of services in national income. In 1951, services constituted 33.25% of the gross domestic product (GDP), whereas manufacturing counted for a mere 10.51%. Agriculture and allied activities accounted for 51.18%. The share of services crossed 40% by 1979–80. In 1991, the year of the onset of economic liberalisation, share of services in GDP was already almost 45%, while manufacturing continued to stagnate at 16.16%. In the next 10 years, services became the single most dominant contributor, accounting for over 51% of GDP. The share of manufacturing has continued to lie between 12% and 15% over the years. Services now constitute over 60% of GDP. Agriculture’s share has fallen to about 15% over the period. Though proportion of people employed in agriculture has not dropped to the same extent, the process had been characterised by migrations of people from agriculture not to manufacturing but into services. These groups were absorbed into the service sector mostly as informal sector workers since the manufacturing sector could not absorb this surplus. The reasons for increasing informalisation of employment are now well documented (Mehrotra 2020). Some of the explanations can be characterised as demand-side explanations, while others fall into the rubric of supply-side explanations. The first of the demand-side explanations has to do with the developmental strategies followed immediately after independence. In the Second Five Year Plan (1955–56 to 1959–60), the Government of India and the Planning Commission adopted a strategy that was subsequently referred to as Import Substitution. The limited domestic savings were to be channelised into large public sector projects with a heavy capital intensity. This strategy was by definition unsuited to absorb surplus labour from agriculture on a large scale. Migrant surplus agrarian workers were then invariably absorbed in the traditional services sector or in unregistered micro-enterprises. Quite a few of them became self-employed workers. What exacerbated the situation was the reservation of several consumer goods for production exclusively for the small-scale sector. By 1990, there were 834 products whose production was reserved exclusively for the small-scale sector. Small-scale firms received many concessions. This meant that most firms had an incentive to stay small, and large firms often spawned many small firms to benefit from the policy. A third factor that contributed was the plethora of complex labour laws, both of the state and the central governments from which small-scale industries and informal sector remained exempt. Organised corporate lobbies and the state worked together to keep the vast majority of workers outside the ambit of labour law protection. As a result, a small “formal sector” with “protected” labour emerged, alongside a vast majority of workforce without any social security and only a minimal legal protection. The provisions for protecting the worker’s interests were seen as impediments to flexible labour practices, leading to investments concentrating in the “exempted” sector. The combined effect of the three factors was inevitable: a mushrooming of tiny units with two to nine workers along with own account workers. The tiny units accounted for almost 84% of the total unorganised units in the non-agricultural sector. The balance were micro-enterprises. Together, they accounted for 99% of the total non-agricultural units in the country (Basole and Chandy 2019; Mehrotra and Giri 2019).

Cities like Mumbai have been major drivers of this pattern of growth, absorbing migrant and surplus labour (Deshpande 1979). By 2005–06, the service sector was already accounting for almost 74% of total output in Mumbai. By 2012–13, this had reached 79%. Clearly, most employment was to be found in this sector. Though Mumbai did have a substantial population engaged in manufacturing, at no point, even before 1991, was it the dominant form of employment (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Distribution trend of sector wise employment in Mumbai 1951–1991 (%)

Sector	1951	1961	1971	1981	1991
Primary	1.4	1.5	1.1	1.3	0.7
Secondary	40.1	44.4	45.4	44.8	39.5
– Manufacturing	36.5	39.7	41.6	40.7	36.8
Tertiary	58.5	54.1	53.5	53.9	59.8
Total	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0
Source : Data from Deshpande and Deshpande (1994).

Evidently between 1961 and 2001 the structure of employment in Mumbai has undergone a significant change (Table 1.2).

Table 1.2 Changing distribution of employment in Mumbai (%)

Activity	1961	1971	1981	1991	2001
Agriculture	1.89	1.26	1.38	0.84	1.12
Manufacturing: Household Industry	1.36	1.33	2.49	1.48	3.12
Manufacturing other than Household Industry	39.46	40.96	38.91	35.31	25.67
Construction	2.66	3.05	3.35	4.24	6.41
Trade and Commerce	18.01	22.36	21.80	24.90	32.9
Transport and Storage	11.22	10.78	10.04	11.32	12.11
Other Services	25.39	20.27	22.02	21.91	18.65
Source : Economic Survey of Maharashtra, various issues, Deshpande and Deshpande (1994).

Services together accounted for a little over 70% of employment in Mumbai in 2001. This trend has only continued in 2011 and beyond.

Employment in the manufacturing sector of Mumbai was substantially larger than that for the country as a whole. For example, in 1991, the share of employment in the secondary sector of India was 12.7%, which by the year 2000 had increased to 17.5%. In Comparison, Mumbai’s share of secondary sector employment was three times that of all India in 1991 (Deshpande and Deshpande 1994). Though Mumbai’s employment sector has been relatively more industrial as compared to the rest of the country, manufacturing as such was never the dominant sector within Mumbai. In that sense, Mumbai reflected the experience of the country as a whole – except to a smaller extent – of services and the tertiary sector being the dominant forms of employment. However, the share of formal and informal employment in Mumbai has been undergoing structural shifts over the years. From 1961 to 1971, the share of the workforce engaged in the formal sector (defined as organisations employing more than 25 workers) increased from 58.03% to 60.52% (Deshpande 1979). This trend was reversed post the textile strike in 1982. From 1991, even the employment in the manufacturing sector tended to become more informalised with increasing use of contract labour. Existing literature attributes this to several reasons. For instance, India’s rigid employee protection laws are argued to have stifled regular employment. Secondly, contract workers are generally available at cheaper wages than regular workers. Also, firms appear to have used the availability of contract workers to keep unions at bay (Kapoor and Krishnapriya 2013). Subsequently, several activities that previously used to constitute formal employment are now in the informal sector.

By 2012, in comparison to other class-I cities (population 100,000 and above as 2011 census), employment in Mumbai was more concentrated in the tertiary sector (NSSO 2015). In 2012, for all class-I cities in the country taken as a whole, 631 out of every 1000 working men were in the tertiary sector. For greater Mumbai, this figure was 694. For women, the all-India figure for class-I cities together was 696. For Mumbai, this was 742. Moreover, that employment opportunities have become highly gendered is evident from the fact that in 2011, the unemployment rate for males in Mumbai (usual status) was 1.3% as against 2.9% for all class-I cities. For women i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Pathways towards Majoritarian Neoliberalism in Mumbai
• Part I Work and Labour: Deregulation and Restructuring
• Part II Infrastructure and Politics: Negotiation and Resistance
• Part III Well-being and Reproduction of Life: Corporatisation and Privatisation
• Glossary
• Index