The Industrial Ephemeral

Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction

Namita Vijay Dharia

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780520383098
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520383111
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Social Sciences

What transformative effects does a multimillion-dollar industry have on those who work within it? The Industrial Ephemeral presents the untold stories of the people, politics, and production chains behind architecture, real estate, and construction in areas surrounding New Delhi, India. The personal histories of those in India's large laboring classes are brought to life as Namita Vijay Dharia discusses the aggressive environmental and ecological metamorphosis of the region in the twenty-first century. Urban planning and architecture are messy processes that intertwine migratory pathways, corruption politics, labor struggle, ecological transformations, and technological development. Rampant construction activity produces an atmosphere of ephemerality in urban regions, creating an aesthetic condition that supports industrial political economy. Dharia's brilliant analysis of the sensibilities and experiences of work lends visibility to the struggle of workers in an era of growing urban inequality.

1 Ephemeral Infrastructures

AT HOME ON THE ROAD

The Indian National Highway 8 (NH8, now renamed NH48) is an expansive length of highway that leads out of India’s NCR toward Jaipur, the capital of the state of Rajasthan. Beginning near Delhi’s diplomatic enclave—Chanakyapuri—the highway runs past the capital city’s international airport and through the city-suburb of Gurgaon (renamed Gurugram) into the state of Rajasthan, from which it moves into Gujarat. The highway rose to prominence in 2012 when the NH8 became part of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), a $90 billion infrastructural endeavor that spans 1,483 kilometers.¹ The construction vision of the DMIC includes plans for industrial townships and heavy industries, a high-speed freight line, three ports, six airports, a six-lane intersection-free expressway, and a 4,000 MW power plant.²

The sheer size and scale of the DMIC proposal indexes the triumph of the Indian road as the public-private pathway (literal and metaphorical) to India’s developmental vision. If during the colonial era railways in India formed the infrastructural intervention of social progress, in the late twentieth century this responsibility shifted onto the infrastructural shoulders of Indian roads.³ While railroads serve as important channels of migration, as the DMIC proposal outlines, road infrastructures are accompanied by large-scale construction visions, building not only highways but also planned commercial projects, industrial zones, and residences along them.

How does infrastructural construction shape the sociality and spatiality of a region and affect the lives of those who build it? Durable road infrastructures, I argue, are formed by an ephemeral core, a core that is the primary site of class, caste, religious, and gender struggle. This ephemeral core is produced through the industrial workings of construction. The construction industry relies on and perpetuates a social and physical ephemeral. A social ephemeral is understood as the affects and relations between people and the circulation and erasure of a labor force, and a physical ephemeral is understood as the transformation of land, architecture, infrastructure, and ecology, keeping in mind that the social and material are not separate but entangled processes. Building on conversations of materiality of infrastructures in anthropology that view infrastructure as a “a social-material assemblage,” I demonstrate that ephemeral workings such as erasures, material conversions, conjurings, and atmospherics form an important dimension of materiality and play a vital role in the politics of infrastructures.⁴

The chapter presents a brief overview of the region, the construction industry, and its people. This overview format resonates with the first stage of construction processes known as site survey, wherein engineers, architects, and developers will examine a region to understand both terrain, infrastructural connections, and social life. At the same time, I introduce different forms of the ephemeral in the construction industry that appear across the book. State actors enact an ephemeral through the withdrawal of state support in strategic spaces, thus creating conditions of economic precarity. Transforming material and aesthetic states, ecologies, and atmospheres can be viewed as instances of the ephemeral that allow social and political relations to be reshaped. The ephemeral manifests in the dematerialization of land into capital and property and drives real estate speculation. The deliberate mobility and displacement of people in construction is an ephemeral that is both aspirational and exclusionary. Construction is accompanied by ephemeral affective states that shape subjectivity and social relations.

Figure 4. Unfinished road in Gurgaon district, 2012. Photo by author.

By focusing on the construction of infrastructure and the social constructions that infrastructure stimulates, I present how a privatized construction industry deploys the ephemeral in the politics of urban development. Unlike studies in anthropology that examine the complexity of state-society relations that surround infrastructures, I emphasize the role of private operators in the urban and infrastructural development of India.⁵ While the state does loom large in construction, the decades since the 1990s have seen a deliberate rescinding of the Indian state from infrastructural construction and key sectors of governance related to it, such as labor welfare. This has allowed for the traction and growth of a privatized construction industry that governs the social and spatial landscapes of urban India.

A DISAPPEARING STATE

It is 8:00 a.m. on a cold January morning. Neelkanth Sir (a retired planner) and I are driving along the NH8. The winter’s cold has brought about a dense fog that does not deter Neelkanth Sir as he steps on the gas. The world around us accelerates. Dust-covered factory sheds and half-built private housing complexes appear and disappear in a sequenced haze. A plot of telephone towers rises like a field of metallic stalks from the fog. The fairy lights of yellow sharab-theka shops (liquor shops) twinkle through the smog, and ghostly tendrils of the dissipating fog weave through the wheat fields. Neelkanth Sir drives me to an industrial estate on the NH8. He wants to show me what planned development in the region looks like, and the area we pull up to is one he helped plan.

The industrial estate is a large stretch of land adjacent to the NH8, and we drive into its quiet streets. Large gridded roads and accompanying infrastructure indicate that the space is state controlled.⁶ The strong planning gesture, however, has had strange results; I am surprised to see no factories or buildings but only barren land. The rectangular plots are empty, save signposts stating warnings not to trespass. Crops grow in the building plots. The estate is a ghost town.

The Haryana State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (HSIIDC) developed this industrial estate, as well as many others along the NH8. The HSIIDC is a parastatal organization that envisions projects, acquires land for them, takes responsibility for the infrastructural development of the land, and controls the bidding or allocation processes for companies. Often the HSIIDC also defines the nature of the industrial estate and accompanying township (e.g., car city, leather city) and reserves a greater percentage of land for select industries. As we drive through the industrial estate with no industries, however, I am reminded that many consider parastatals public entities that act in private interests; parastatals are accused of supporting corporate rather than citizen interests. This sentiment extends to the widespread belief among construction workers about the inconsistency of state welfare and regulatory protections. The life stories of Yusef, Ahmed, and Chandra describe how the contemporary state creates an ephemeral presence: it selectively extracts itself from public protections while exerting its power in other arenas, opening avenues for privatized development.

The life history of Haryana town planner Yusef is an example of state welfare in the years before privatization. A fifty-year-old Muslim man, Yusef enjoys a comfortable post in the Department of Town and Country Planning in Haryana. I interview him in his home, a two-story bungalow, filled with plants Yusef cares for. His early childhood, he narrates, was structured by landlessness, agriculture, and India’s educational and land reform policies. His two daughters move through the bungalow, playing, as he talks about his life.

“I was born in Rajasthan. My mummy and papa were uneducated landless laborers,” Yusef reminds me that his middle-class life had humble beginnings. Yusef’s father was bullied out of his share of ancestral land by Yusef’s uncle, and the family was forced to migrate to Yusef’s mother’s village. Schooling was important to Yusef’s mother, and she insisted her two sons be educated; the two brothers enrolled in public school. As Yusef grew older he helped bolster family income through sharecropping and other forms of manual labor; due to this he struggled to stay in school. He worked in brick kilns with his family one summer: “The conditions were not conducive there. And I was a child. For five to seven days, I fell ill. But then I thought we have to work hard. . . . So very good, the highest amount one lakh five thousand bricks were made by us—the full family.”

The family struggled in absolute poverty until a government scheme for landless laborers gave Yusef’s father 5 bhigas (approximately 3 acres) of land in the early 1970s. This stability was, however, short-lived, as Yusef’s father passed away from a snake bite in 1976, shifting responsibility onto the shoulders of the schoolgoing brothers. Once again Yusef struggled to make ends meet. “I was a laborer lifting stones for one rupee a day. But I ran off after half a day. I bought a few vegetables and started selling them in the market. After that I started selling ice candy.” Yusef and his brother did odds jobs to keep the family afloat and stay in school. Well-meaning educators stepped in and paid Yusef’s school fees in the ninth grade and bought him a uniform. “That was the turning point. In the tenth grade I was thirteenth in the state. . . . I got a fellowship to go to college. I used to send money home and pay for instruments [tools] for the fields.”

Yusef’s intelligence, and the social and state structures around him, served him well. He got a degree in geography and was offered a scholarship to the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology in Ahmedabad. He supported his family with his scholarship money, returned to Haryana to take the state exam for planners, and entered the state’s town planning department. State-led land reforms, technological subsidies, and educational scholarships moved a landless Yusef into middle-class comfort.

The pathways the state constructed for Yusef are different in contemporary times. Younger site workers argue that the many scenarios of economic mobility provided through state aid require equal amounts of financial investment and social capital (though Yusef too had a degree of social capital). Workers complain that they need to bribe officials to get into the army, to gain governmental jobs such as those of schoolteachers, to access developmental funds, and to work for projects initiated under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).⁷ In contrast now, the private sector emerges as a new pathway to social mobility. Workers believe that learning skills on construction sites and making contacts will help them move up the economic ladder faster. They see the new technologies brought in by private companies as something that will pave their way to economic mobility; private companies tend to have greater budgets and a transnational presence, allowing them to be equipment-heavy construction firms. This allows companies to become a pathway of economic mobility where English, skilling (construction training), and technological prowess hold force. The rise of the private sector has seen a replacement of state support with a mobile, entrepreneurial dream. The ephemeral manifests as the rescinding of state welfare, tossing workers into the vagaries of privatization, ensuring the marginalization of some and success of others, as Ahmed and Chandra’s stories depict.

In the contemporary construction industry, road construction has moved from state built (from the 1950s to 1990s) to public-private partnerships (PPP) and privatized management. Special state parastatals, created to build highways, hand over build-operate-transfer (BOT) contracts to infrastructural firms. Infrastructural firms are given development rights for tracts of land along the highway as incentives. The mega-scale brings an influx of multinational construction firms and technologies. Important highways in India are now built with advanced technological equipment that can construct four to five kilometers per day. These machines create concrete roads far more durable than the traditional bitumen ones. Some new expressways between cities are built with paver technology. In this construction process, concrete is cast in 3.5–3.74-meter by 7-meter (or custom-sized) blocks. A machine guides the layout out of concrete and is continuous in motion. The concrete is smoothened on site with the help of guide rails and sensors to ensure the mix falls into place at the right angles, heights, and curvatures. This creates a seamless and smooth highway where technology controls the levels and path of the road, as well as facilitating a higher speed of construction. The technology, known as “slip-form pavers,” produces new highways at a faster pace.

Ahmed is a tremix contractor on the Wandering Woods site and a vocal proponent of privatization. Ahmed’s generation cannot rely on the public supports that Yusef had, but learning new technologies gave Ahmed a step up in life. Tremixing is a form of casting concrete floors that allows them to harden in far more durable ways than ordinary casting processes. The resultant floors are ideal for heavy-use spaces such as factory floors and parking garages. Floors are cast in bays of 2 by 2 meters, and a machine sucks the water out of them to quickly cure and harden them with the help of additional chemical applications.

Ahmed stands apart from other workers; he is always exceptionally well-dressed for someone who works with cement-concrete. His usual dress code consists of ironed shirts and clean blue jeans. He sits by the side of the square panel under concretization and supervises his staff as they pour concrete and even it out. He then removes his own shirt, lays it on cement bags nearby, and rolls up his jeans before he gets to work. He swooshes an aluminum bar (fanti) across the concrete to level its surface and attaches the tremix cloth and pump to the finished panel. One day, after much cajoling, he tells me of his experiences. His class category reads very differently from other workers’, and so I am taken aback when he tells me he has very little education.⁸

Ahmed’s father is a tailor in their village, and he is one of eight children: five sons and three daughters. A landless, non-dominant-caste tailor, Ahmed’s father could barely make enough to feed them all. As Ahmed describes it, this financial pressure left his father ill and stressed (pareshani), and the elder, male children stepped in to help. Ahmed’s elder brother was the first to leave their village in the tribal areas of the new state of Chhattisgarh; he became a mason in Gurgaon. Ahmed speaks of the family’s absolute poverty: he worked the fields from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. before school but eventually was too ashamed to go to school because of his lack of clothes. “I did not have clothes to wear. I used to go to school in only underwear or torn shorts. . . . I did not have a decent notebook, or pen, or a pencil. At that time a pencil cost 10–25 paisa. I did not even have that.”

The constant beatings he received at school and his lack of clothes, books, and tools eventually took their toll. Ahmed stopped going, in an act of shame and rebellion. After he “roamed” around in the village for a few years, his family encouraged him to join his brother. He came to Gurgaon. “For two, three months, I just looked and roamed around, and then went back to the village. Then I came back from the village and slowly, slowly learnt.” He found the work to be “OK” (theek). His brother taught him a mason’s work bit by bit. He would correct Ahmed on the proper usage of tools. Sometimes he would stop working on a project and ask Ahmed to take over. “After six months I said that I want to work on my own.” Ahmed went to Chandigarh and on from Chandigarh to Varnala. He used his kinship networks and moved through information gained from friends and acquaintances. He received his first contract job to tremix a power plant. He got himself two helpers to work for him. Confident from that experience, he returned to Delhi and asked his brother to buy him a tremix machine. They borrowed money from family and friends, looked for a cheap machine, cajoled a dealer for a discount, and bought one. He has been working on his own since; that was in 2003.

Smart and quick-witted, Ahmed has an opinion on everything. He derides public schools and hospitals, critiques class hierarchies in India, and dreams of...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Anonymity
• Introduction: An Asynchronous Time Line
• 1. Ephemeral Infrastructures
• 2. The Financial Sublime
• 3. Drawing Fantasies
• 4. The Industry of Sound
• 5. Inside the Pit
• 6. Concrete Love
• Conclusion: Inquilab Zindabad (Long Live Revolution)
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index