Industrial destabilisation: The case of Rajajinagar,Bangalore

Abstract

Chinese

There has been a recent interest in expanding the focus of deindustrialisation studies to the cities of the Global South. Bangalore, with its long legacy of state sponsored industrialisation, as well as a substantial shift in its economy following economic liberalisation in 1991, presents itself as a suitable case to examine the impacts of industrial transformation. We study the decline of the engineering economy in one of Bangalore’s earliest planned industrial suburbs, Rajajinagar, to understand how industrial restructuring at the city and national scale has affected and reconfigured local economies. Using this case study, we make two main theoretical contributions: one, we bring out shifts at a neighbourhood scale that go beyond the existing literature on neoliberal transformations in Bangalore as well as other Indian cities. Two, the case also allows us to assess the limitations of deindustrialisation as a framework to analyse these changes, and we suggest a modified framework, that of ‘industrial destabilisation’.

Keywords

deindustrialisation industrial restructuring informality planning urban history

Introduction

There has been a recent interest in expanding the focus of deindustrialisation studies to contexts of the Global South, partly driven by work such as Rodrik’s, on ‘premature deindustrialisation’ in late industrialising countries (Pike, 2020; Rodrik, 2016; Schindler et al., 2020). However, other arguments state that postcolonial cities ‘never experienced the cycles of disuse, vacancy or disinvestment witnessed in Euro-American cities’ (Ghertner, 2014), making the postindustrial label ill-suited to these economies (Harris, 2012). We argue that Indian cities have undergone industrial transformations that are worthy of investigation, particularly for their impacts on land and labour.

Bangalore, with its long legacy of state-supported industrialisation in the post-Independence decades, as well as a substantial shift in its economy following the liberalisation of the national economy in 1991, presents an excellent location to think about how to conceptualise industrial change in cities of the Global South. However, the literature on Bangalore during the past few decades has focused more on the explosive growth of the software industry and on the rise of the city as a ‘technopole’ (Carlson, 2018; Heitzman, 2004; Nair, 2005; Pani, 2009). Even though this work acknowledges the roots of the technology industry in the industrial infrastructure planned and built by the state in an earlier era (Heitzman, 2004; Nair, 2005; Parthasarathy, 2004; Subramanian, 2017), it rarely focuses on the ‘decline’ of the key sectors of the older manufacturing base such as engineering goods and electronics.¹

We use the case of one particular planned industrial and residential suburb, Rajajinagar, built and allotted during the 1960s, to understand how industrial restructuring at the city and national scale has affected and reconfigured the local economy of the neighbourhood. Using the case of Rajajinagar, we make two main theoretical contributions: one, we highlight the limitations of deindustrialisation as a framework to analyse the changes unfolding in Rajajinagar, and suggest a modified framework, that of ‘industrial destabilisation’. Two, we bring out shifts at a neighbourhood scale that go beyond the existing literature on neoliberal transformations in Bangalore as well as other Indian cities, that tend to focus on processes of financialisation, real estate speculation and elite capture on the one hand, and on marginalisation, vulnerability and informal housing on the other.²

Within the framework of ‘industrial destabilisation’, we are particularly interested in tracing the impacts on land and labour following industrial restructuring, and the institutional arrangements that mediate these shifts. Therefore, we engage with existing theories to understand land transformation and redevelopment (such as gentrification and speculation) (Goldman, 2011; Smith, 1987), shifts in the production process following economic restructuring (decentralisation, informalisation) (Breman and van der Linden, 2014; Chen and Raveendran, 2012; Dicken, 1998; Frobel et al., 1989) and the interaction of informal economies with local politics and informal planning (Benjamin, 1993, 2000, 2004; Roy, 2009a, 2009b).

The paper begins by explaining our theoretical framework and situating this within the conceptual underpinnings of our work. This is followed by our empirical sections in which we explain the case of Bangalore and Rajajinagar. We then interpret these shifts in light of the theories outlined above, and our formulation of ‘industrial destabilisation’. We conclude with an agenda for further research and theory-building.

(Re)theorising deindustrialisation

Recent work on deindustrialisation attempts to build our theoretical understanding of the ways in which deindustrialisation has led to increasing socio-spatial inequality in cities, and in particular, aims to expand the geographies of deindustrialisation studies beyond the Euro-American contexts they originated from (Pike, 2020; Schindler et al., 2020). While Schindler et al. attempt to build a bridge with postcolonial urban theory, suggesting the use of comparison as a tool for expanding our theoretical knowledge of all cities (North and South), Pike’s work proposes a framework of geographical political economy, with its attention to differentiated pathways and institutions across contexts to study deindustrialisation and its political fallout in both the Global North and South.

Pike acknowledges that these disconnections (between geographies and across disciplines) have ‘constrained understanding, limited explanation and hampered policy formulation in addressing territorial development challenges in an increasingly inter-dependent global context’ (Pike, 2020: 4). We argue that these disconnections are precisely because we might be trying to group related but distinct phenomena across Northern and Southern contexts under the umbrella term, deindustrialisation.

In the Euro-American contexts where deindustrialisation studies originated, there was usually a decline of a particular industry accompanied by a large and absolute decrease in industrial jobs or output at the city scale (Lever, 1991). In Southern contexts with rapidly growing cities and workforces, it is often not absolute declines in jobs but rather shifts in the wage relation and the institutional structures by which production is organised that result in similar increases in socio-spatial inequalities and shifts in urban politics.

We propose a framework of ‘industrial destabilisation’ that can bring to the fore the specific nature of industrial transformations unfolding in late industrialising countries such as India. In these contexts, forces of global capitalism and the associated trends of precarious work, footloose firms and depressed wages have often meant a further informalisation of industrial sectors that were underdeveloped to begin with.

‘Industrial destabilisation’ therefore describes the shift in the organisation of industry in favour of more flexibilised production, as well as more precarious labour arrangements, which might or might not be triggered by an episode of decline of a particular industry (as in the Euro-American deindustrialisation cases). Even though this might not lead to absolute declines in industrial employment at the city scale, it does lead to the destabilisation of work (the decline in full-time, stable, long-term employment, the decline in wage levels, collective bargaining, social security and the informalisation of work).

It also includes shifts in geography of production at the metropolitan scale, or a destabilisation of a particular industry from its former spatial location. This goes beyond deindustrialisation studies that are typically associated with a shifting geography of production at the global scale, emphasising the offshoring and decentralisation of production (Frobel et al., 1989). In this frame, the Global South became the recipient of offshored industry (Schindler et al., 2020), while the spatial shifts occurring within these geographies were obscured. We argue that Indian cities have witnessed other shifts in the organisation of production at the metropolitan scale, such as the peripheralisation of large industry (Chakravorty, 2000; Coelho and Vijayabaskar, 2014; Ghani et al., 2012). This has implications for the neighbourhoods affected by these shifts, as we will demonstrate using the case of Rajajinagar.

Therefore, we argue that in Southern contexts, processes of industrial transformation are underway with similar consequences to those that unfolded in the Global North; however, by framing deindustrialisation as aggregate job or output losses, these studies from the South will either remain outside that frame, or end up treating deindustrialisation as ‘background context for other processes’ (Schindler et al., 2020: 287). We argue that a frame of ‘industrial destabilisation’, with its emphasis on the different starting points as well as the distinct processes of industrial change, can allow us to make advances in our theory and understanding.

Analysing ‘industrial destabilisation’ and its implications

In order to further develop this nascent body of work using the case of a planned industrial estate and its decline, we bring together perspectives on the following dimensions of industrial restructuring: one, the change in the organisation of industrial production in favour of more informalised production; two, the shifting geography of industrial production; three, the context of land markets, redevelopment and gentrification; and four, the institutions governing these shifts.

Globally, deindustrialisation in America and Europe was accompanied by a shift in the system of economic production from Fordist to post-Fordist, characterised by more spatially disaggregated and flexible forms of labour processes and industrial organisation (Amin, 2011). However, as we argue in the previous section, this description cannot be directly applied in late industrialising countries, and in particular, in India, where the project of state led industrialisation never fully materialised. The development of the formal manufacturing sector was incomplete and partial, and this situation has further worsened following economic liberalisation in 1991. The new jobs created by industry in the last few decades have been within the realm of informal production, and informal manufacturing firms now account for 75% of manufacturing employment (Basole and Basu, 2011). The new trend that has gained salience has been ‘the extensive use of informal employment (casual and subcontracted) by formal firms looking for “labour flexibility”’ (Basole and Basu, 2011: 64).

This has significant implications for the shrinking number of quality jobs available to urban residents (Barnes, 2015; Chen and Raveendran, 2012). Informalisation of production and blue-collar jobs has also led to a localisation of politics and governance practices (Gooptu, 2007). These trends have important implications for the nature of work available in Southern cities, eventually raising important questions about urban inequality. Despite this, there is little work analysing the implications of these shifts in the mode of industrial production for Indian urbanisation. Some exceptions are Gidwani and Maringanti’s work on waste, and Coelho and Vijayabhaskar’s study which looks at how small town urbanism in India is shaped by informal industrial production, particularly the concentration of informal firms in the city that are largely invisible to the planning process (Coelho and Vijayabaskar, 2014; Gidwani and Maringanti, 2016).

A second aspect that becomes relevant is the shifting geography of industrial production relative to urban locations. In India, there have been shifts in the geography of production at the national and metropolitan scale since economic liberalisation in the early 1990s and an increasing integration with the global economy. Large manufacturing in the organised sector has declined within the core of large metropolitan areas and shifted to their immediate peripheries (Chakravorty, 2003; Deichmann et al., 2008; Vishwanath et al., 2013), while informal manufacturing has seen greater concentration in urban areas (Ghani et al., 2012).

The closure of large industries in core city areas has often been accompanied by the redevelopment of former industrial lands, and a substantial body of work has highlighted the role of financialisation of land and real estate in producing a particular model of redevelopment driven by high-end real estate (Adarkar and Phatak, 2005; Banerjee-Guha, 2010; Schindler et al., 2020). The work on analysing the postindustrial trajectories of mill lands in Mumbai has also been accompanied by a set of debates around the appropriateness of gentrification as a concept to study these changes (Ghertner, 2015; Harris, 2012).

However, more broadly, there has been a body of research that has studied the growing significance of real estate capital in remaking Indian cities following economic liberalisation and the growth of the service economy. In this vein, land transformations in Indian cities have been described as ‘speculative urbanism’, with a portrayal of the shifting role of government towards land speculation and active dispossession, as well as heightened anxieties for people’s abilities to hold onto their living spaces, jobs and livelihoods in the speculative city (Goldman, 2011).

Finally, in order to interpret shifts in land markets following economic restructuring, it becomes important to understand the institutional context within which these shifts have unfolded – in particular, we focus on the legacy of planning and contemporary modes of informal planning and local politics. Bhan (2013) argues that we need to see Indian cities not ‘as planned, but as an outcome of planning’ (Bhan, 2013: 59). In his attempt to diagnose the ‘failure of planning’, Bhan (2013) argues that ‘plans do not control, but they influence, determine and limit’ (Bhan, 2013: 59).

Planning processes as well as local politics play a role in determining changes in land use and therefore governing how land gets used for different kinds of economies. Informality has now become a familiar concept through which to understand the processes of planning in Southern cities (Bhan, 2013; McFarlane, 2012; Roy, 2005, 2009a, 2009b). Roy (2009a) argues that in Southern contexts, informality ‘is a “mode” of the production of space’, which ‘produces an uneven geography of spatial value’ (Roy, 2009a: 826). This uneven geography is produced precisely through the process of drawing a distinction between formal and informal, which is ‘often a highly effective “spatial fix” in the production of value and profits’ (Roy, 2009a: 826). In addition to planning, local economies in neighbourhood industrial clusters are sustained through informal processes of generating value that are created by interacting with local politics in order to produce ‘flexible’ land settings (Benjamin, 2004).

Methods

In this paper, we attempt to understand the particularities of how industrial change at the city and national scale unfold in a specific neighbourhood. Therefore, we utilise a case study approach, to explore how industrial change has affected the neighbourhood of Rajajinagar in Bangalore. The selection of the case was preceded by several interviews with experts, scholars, state officials, public sector employees and labour leaders across the city that helped in setting the larger context of the industrial transformation of the city.

We use a mixed methods approach to examine the case of Rajajinagar through a close reading of historical plans, policy documents and through a series of semi-structured interviews. We carried out around 40 interviews with small scale industrialists, long-term residents, real estate experts, industrial workers, planners, owners of commercial enterprises, owners of wedding halls, and state government officials, using snowball sampling and a reputational method to identify respondents. Our fieldwork included both in-person and telephone interviews and was conducted between September 2019 and August 2020.

The context: From national and city scale to the neighbourhood scale

Bangalore has witnessed rapid urban growth in the last three decades alongside the rise of the tech and software industries and the inflow of foreign capital investment. But the city has had a long history of state and private investment in technology-based industries and institutions that spans across different scales of economic planning.

Historical context: State and national

Since the early 20th century, Bangalore was a beneficiary of the Mysore Princely State’s early efforts of modernisation, which included the setting up of textile mills and hydroelectric infrastructure by the early 20th century (Castán Broto and Sudhira, 2019). The history of state led industrialisation by the princely state government left a spatial legacy on the location of industries in the eastern and western part of Bangalore. The British Cantonment on the east of the city was the site of mainly World War II factories, for defence and aircraft manufacturing, that were later transformed into national industries after Independence. The engineering sector, a key focus of this paper, came to be historically concentrated in the north-western industrial belt which lay in the City,³ governed by the Mysore government, in areas such as Rajajinagar, Yeshwanthpur and Peenya (Mysore, 1963). Figure 1 shows the extent of the City in 1897 that was governed by the Mysore Princely State to the west, as well as the part that came under the jurisdiction of the British Cantonment in the east.

Figure 1.

Map of Bangalore showing Rajajinagar, and the erstwhile City and Cantonment areas. Courtesy: Tinu Jose, IIHS Geo-Spatial Lab.

After Independence in 1947, Bangalore’s second wave of state led industrialisation was led by the national government, as part of its efforts to achieve industrial modernisation and import-substituting industrialisation. It was chosen as a key site for several public sector undertakings (PSUs) and defence research establishments that were located here because of its strategic location away from the newly formed nation’s volatile borders (Heitzman, 2004; Nair, 2005).

Bangalore and state led industrialisation until 1980s

This legacy of state led industrialisation is significant because it had implications for the quality of industrial jobs in the city. Bangalore makes for an important case to study the impacts of economic restructuring, because the industrial profile of the city represented the ‘pinnacle’ of industrial work, with large public sector firms employing workers with full social protection, living in and around planned townships with shared social infrastructure, and with the industrial worker being a key focus for planning in the city until the 1970s (Heitzman, 2004; Nair, 2005). Our interviews revealed that even the private sector industries in Bangalore ensured a parity of wages and benefits with the public sector, in order to retain their workforce.

Significant parts of the city were developed as part of the socialist approach to industrial planning during this phase. The neighbourhood of Rajajinagar exemplified the ways in which the pre-reforms industrial economy and its production relations were tied to urban space, in a distinctly non-Fordist way. Rajajinagar was planned by the City Improvement Trust Board (CITB) in the 1960s, as its first industrial suburb, with 500 acres of land for housing and 500 acres for industries; this ‘work, live, play’ modelled suburb was seen to have ‘broken new ground’ (Outline Development Plan for the Bangalore Metropolitan Region; see Mysore (India: State), Bangalore Metropolitan Planning Board, 1963). The industrial suburb was explicitly planned for small and medium industries, in close proximity to the large industries in this part of the city. The CITB, much like planning bodies across the country at the time, was taking up the mantle of planning for national development, housing for different classes and thinking about ‘public interest’ in urban planning.

The suburbs planned at this time were meant to house the dramatically increased population of the city, a result of several public sector industries being set up in the city (Nair, 2005). Eventually, over several rounds of allotments, houses in Rajajinagar were mostly inhabited by Karnataka state government employees and industrial workers. Rajajinagar was an example of how economic and spatial planning were integrated in planning visions for Bangalore, setting it apart from its counterparts such as Bombay and Calcutta that were industrialised by the British and developed in a relatively unplanned manner (Adarkar, 2011).

Rajajinagar: A planned industrial suburb

The industrial suburb was divided into a government owned estate which leased out plots to industrialists and a private estate, wherein plots were bought and owned by industrialists (these two areas face each other across a main road called Chord Road, indicated in the inset in Figure 1). We will return to this distinction later in the paper. Most of the industrialists who started small scale industries in the suburb were workers turned entrepreneurs and were already part of the industrial economy, having worked in the large manufacturing firms in the city.

This relationship along with geographical proximity to large industries was crucial in defining the production chain of the small industries, as it determined the inflow of orders, technological support and aid in capital for most of these industries. Industrialists would not only use their prior relations in order to secure orders but also maintain access to machinery and avenues for training in new technology and skill building. These interdependencies were buttressed by the institutional context, wherein industrial policy encouraged large firms especially in the public sector to ancillarise a fixed portion of their production for local entrepreneurs.

As a neighbourhood ‘thriving with industries’, as described by an old industrialist, it crucially benefited from co-location with the Karnataka Small Scale Industries Development Corporation (KSSIDC), several skills training and R&D institutions that formed a part of the state’s institutional network dedicated to the growth of small scale entrepreneurs (Holmstrom, 1997). The north-western part of the city was thus a dense industrial belt, and small scale industrialists, workers and engineers participating in this economy also resided in planned areas such as Rajajinagar.

Industrial restructuring in Rajajinagar: The past three decades

The Indian national government undertook a series of regulatory reforms in 1991, commonly referred to as economic liberalisation. These marked a considerable departure from the previous approach of import-substituting industrialisation, direct state ownership of industry and limits on the inflow of foreign capital. After 1991, the role of the state in direct ownership of industry declined considerably, the regulatory barriers for private and foreign capital were relaxed, and export orientation was encouraged (Chakravorty, 2000). These shifts in the national economy had sweeping implications for Indian cities, with some industries going into decline while others started growing rapidly.

Economic liberalisation and its impacts on Bangalore

Economic liberalisation introduced tremendous changes to the national economy, as well as to the city of Bangalore. The effects of the rise of IT and related industries on real estate and commodification of land in the city have been widely studied (Goldman, 2011; Idiculla, 2016). The real estate boom was most visibly articulated in the southern and eastern parts of the city where the IT industry was located (Rao and Suman, 2020). This was accompanied by a growth in informal settlements in the city and by the expansion of the metropolitan area. The economic reforms and rise of the IT sector had crucial implications for the existing industrial economy in the city.

At the national level, policy reforms resulted in the opening up of the economy for foreign investment. This exposed underprepared public sector industries to external competition, and thus put a sudden end to their monopolistic position in different sectors (Subramanian, 2014). Several public sector industries as well as large scale manufacturing firms began making losses and headed towards closure. There were shifts in economic policy that encouraged competition in certain sectors, such as consumer goods, whereas core sectors of the economy were still retained by the government. A shift towards disinvestment and privatisation, through several disinvestment drives, along with the collapse of the labour unions across the country had an adverse impact on the industrial economy. These national level changes had major consequences for Bangalore’s industrial economy, anchored by large public sector and private firms. These shifts in the industrial economy and the modes of production also had a deep impact on the spatial organisation of economic activity in the city.

Impacts of economic liberalisation on Rajajinagar

The decline and closure of several of the PSUs in Bangalore was accompanied by some private sector firms in this neighbourhood (such as Kirloskar) also shutting down at this time. Others moved to peripheral locations and industrial estates such as Bommasandra and Veersandra, which offered better tax incentives. Several of these large firms were earlier procuring from the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Rajajinagar industrial estate, and these interdependencies between big and small firms in this cluster were affected. This led to many dependent SMEs being unable to continue their businesses, because of closures of large industries, changes in technology, competition from cheaper foreign goods and labour issues. Thus, while IT and related industries were being set up and enjoying a favourable institutional and governance climate, in parallel, parts of the city embedded in an older era of industrial production were witnessing a different set of changes.

Following this wave of closures in the 1990s, a new set of industries emerged in the government estate, such as printing, software, graphics and hardware refurbishing industries, with low labour costs and meeting the more stringent pollution regulations governing industries in the city. While erstwhile government owned industries failed to sustain their foothold in the estate, those that were located on the private estate transitioned in other ways. Leveraging their ownership of the plots and their networks within the neighbourhood and the city, some of them closed down and sold their units. The old and new owners converted these plots into marriage halls or Kalyana Mantapas, in some cases simply refurbishing the original industrial sheds as marriage halls.

While many of these private plots were used primarily for rent driven developments, some small and micro industrial units still continued to operate in the industrial sheds behind the main road, albeit with major sectoral shifts. The private industrial town thus had a mix of both commercial use such as marriage halls and granite showrooms as well as industrial use, with different kinds of industries. Industrialists and KSSIDC officials tell us how the Rajajinagar industrial area, once known for its specialisation in the engineering sector, is now mainly dominated by new activities in order to adapt to the changed economic context of the city.

The decentralisation and reorganisation of production regimes also led to a shift in production into informal industrial clusters. With units shutting down in the industrial estate, erstwhile workers employed in SMEs started home-based production units within the informal settlements S-Palaya and D-Nagar,⁴ which lay within Rajajinagar. Thus, within the neighbourhood, there were several locality level changes in response to city wide and national level economic changes.

Decoding impacts of economic restructuring in Rajajinagar

As outlined above, the main shifts in Rajajinagar were the decline of large and small firms in the engineering industry, a continuation of informalised production and the transformation of privately owned plots into service economies that fitted the local demographic profile. In order to analyse these shifts, we attempt to assess the transformation in production, the implications for labour, as well as the shifts in the use of land. We do this through the lens of the institutional terrain mediating this set of shifts: the profile and identity of the neighbourhood, and the role of governance, planning and local politics.

Transformation in production

The engineering industry in this part of the city was a dense cluster of firms of different sizes (from large to micro), training institutions and the state department for promotion of small industries. With the large firms, particularly the PSUs, going into decline and other large private firms moving to the peripheries, the entire supply chain suffered from a shock that the small and medium industries could not withstand. For the large firms that still existed, although in the peripheries of the city, they underwent a shift in production with increasing pressures of efficiency, an increase in ancillarisation and the outsourcing of the production of spare parts. These demands are now fulfilled by home-based informal manufacturers that are most active in informal settlements and urban villages like S-Palaya and D-Nagar within the Rajajinagar ward.

Informalised production

Many long-term residents and industrialists from the locality point to the ‘real industrial transformation’ taking place in localities such as S-Palaya and D-Nagar. The increase in industrial production in these informal settlements reflects the change in mechanisms of production within larger factories, which depend increasingly on subcontracting of the production of spare parts to small and micro firms. Respondents claimed that their client base was more or less identical to that of the earlier small scale industries in the government estate. These units are primarily home-based, largely depending on family labour rather than paid workers, this becoming the ‘mode of surplus extraction’ as described in Basole and Basu (2011). The access to cheap labour and the lack of compliance or taxation costs in these spaces is critical to their persistence in the supply chains of the engineering industry, which has either declined or partially shifted its spatial location from this part of the city.

By contrast, an industrialist who was operating in the government industrial estate explained how he downsized his business and got rid of all his employees because of difficulties in managing labour, and complying with registration and tax requirements. He now takes orders from large firms and fulfils them by outsourcing to micro industries in S-Palaya and D-Nagar. His value addition is the interpretation of the diagrams provided by large firms, which the home-based industries in S-Palaya and D-Nagar do not have the technical capacity for.

Relationship to planning and local politics

The intensification of production in urban villages, or those areas where regulation is less cumbersome, or where development is less ‘legible’ to the state, is a significant shift for a neighbourhood of the city that has a long history of state-supported industrialisation (Scott, 1999). To understand this, it is important to understand the history of informal settlements such as D-Nagar and S-Palaya. These have existed as urban villages within the city boundaries, with a mix of industrial and agricultural activities taking place. Historical maps of Bangalore, as early as 1930, indicate the existence of some of these urban villages as early ‘labour colonies’, which were kept out of the realm of planning, even when the CITB built around them. These settlements have gradually been included within the boundary of the urban local body, Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), and fall under a complex terrain of governance as they were not planned and built by civic authorities.

As our respondent who operates an industry in S-Palaya explained, earlier they were governed by a village panchayat and did not have to follow any rules regarding plot setbacks,⁵ starting an industry in their homes or complying with zoned land use, but after being incorporated into city limits, they have to bear a greater burden of compliance with rules that were never applicable before. In addition, they are now required to pay taxes, despite having very poor access to infrastructure such as roads and power.

Therefore, we see how residents of S-Palaya and D-Nagar are using their residential plots to derive value from industrial home-based work, by leveraging their networks and history of embeddedness in the industrial economy in this part of the city. We find Benjamin’s framing of ‘local economies’ an appropriate choice through which to read this multiplicity of transformations. Benjamin’s work highlights the emergence of dense manufacturing and trade clusters of small-firm-based neighbourhood economies in Delhi and Bangalore that are organised in sophisticated ways and generate substantial employment (Benjamin, 2000, 2004; Benjamin and Raman, 2011).

He also highlights the paradox at the heart of this: how ‘complex tenure forms and mixed land use seen as “unplanned” turn out to be pre-requisites for economic development’, and how it is essential to understand the role of local government and local democracy in analysing these processes (2004: 177). In parallel with how firms located in Electronics City use the difference between urban and rural jurisdictions to their advantage (Balakrishnan, 2017), firms in this neighbourhood also leverage the lack of legibility in these spaces in their favour. However, in their case, unlike for the IT firms in Electronics City, it at best confers a marginal benefit, allowing them to undercut their competitors, but in the process further squeezes their own margins to barely subsistence levels.

Implications for labour

It is this shift in the production process that is at the heart of understanding the implications for labour. From an earlier era of state-supported industrialisation characterised by stable and long-term employment, we find that even small and medium-sized industries were not able to continue after the closure of large industries in this area. The more marginal forms of production that rely on downgraded labour and low levels of investment have continued to survive. In the new commercial economy of Kalyana Mantapas in the planned industrial estate (explained in the next sub-section) as well as in the home-based industrial economy of S-Palaya and D-Nagar, informalisation of work is a common thread. However, the fact that some of this engineering work still remains in the neighbourhood, and has not been eradicated by forces of real estate speculation allows these workers to continue in technical fields, rather than switching to an equally precarious alternative like street vending, as they expressed in their conversations with us.

Shifts in the use of land

While many of the government owned industries in the Rajajinagar industrial estate closed down and were replaced by other economic activities that were more suited to the changed economic context, others on the private plots shifted to primarily rent driven developments. Several marriage halls, granite showrooms and other kinds of small and micro industries now operate in the private industrial town.

Socio-demographic profile

These shifts have been shaped by the socio-demographic profile of the adjoining residential suburb of Rajajinagar. While the residential area is fairly mixed, it can be characterised as a primarily Hindu and Kannadiga neighbourhood, where the intrastate migrants of the city and blue-collar workers have historically resided. Interviews with long-term residents revealed that over the decades allotments have been influenced by the dynamics of political economy, meaning prevalent caste groups, such as Lingayats and Vokkaligas who are an important source of political votes, have been favoured.

Years of state sponsored industrial work and stable employment that most residents enjoyed have led to significant social mobility, although the area is described universally by most respondents as a ‘middle-caste, middle-class and lower middle-class neighbourhood’. Additionally, those who have developed commercial enterprises in the recent past, such as Kalyana Mantapas in the industrial town, belong to prominent land owning communities of Karnataka, such as the Vokkaligas and Reddys. These developments have been contingent on mobilising social networks and caste ties of these different social groups rooted in the neighbourhood, as became clear from interviews with owners of Kalyana Mantapas. Social mobility as well as a strengthened socio-political identity in the neighbourhood have had important influences on the transformation that has taken place.

Differences in land tenure

Private industrial plots have been able to transition to other lucrative real estate opportunities that seem feasible on the plot size and within the socio-economic context of the neighbourhood, which industrialists on the government estate could not avail of as an option. Here, the difference in public versus private ownership of plots in the government owned industrial estate versus the privately owned industrial town has meant different trajectories for these two areas, even though both have similar plot sizes and are separated from each other just by a main road (discussed in greater detail in the next sub-section). Industrialists who continue to operate in the industrial estate have spoken of the difficulties of carrying out industries within government mandated industrial estates, such as challenges of regulation, taxes, costs of labour and power.

Legacy of planning

The changes that have taken place in the industrial area have gone beyond what the original plan envisioned. But at the same time, the plan limits and circumscribes the possibilities of what can happen on these sites of planning. The commercial developments that emerged in the private industrial plots were constrained by the small size of plots, due to the legacy of planning for small industry. While neighbouring large industrial plots such as Kirloskar and the textile mills have been attractive to real estate developers and are being redeveloped into high-end real estate and commercial projects, such a trajectory of redevelopment did not take place in the case of Rajajinagar. Here, we find a narrative of change that cannot be explained by gentrification or speculation.

However, we argue this cannot be read only as a legacy of planning and the plot size restricting redevelopment opportunities. It is also the embeddedness in this particular neighbourhood, with its pre-colonial and socio-cultural history, that has shaped the outcomes we see here. The choice of wedding halls and convention centres not only fitted the size of the plot that was available, but also fitted the needs of the ‘middle-class, lower middle-class’, and the ‘traditional’ communities that resided in this part of the city. Interview respondents speak of the large gap in the market for wedding and event halls in Rajajinagar that these postindustrial developments filled, a new kind of ‘industry’ replacing an older industry. Being part of the historic core Kannadiga areas of the city therefore shaped the economic choices made by these entrepreneurs.

The industrial to commercial changes that have taken place in the small plots indicate the ways in which benefits from land accrued primarily for the residents of the neighbourhood. We see that the industrial plots in both the government estate and private town have not been redeveloped for high-end real estate, and continue to derive ‘use value’ from the plots. These plots have not shifted from a primary, industrial circuit to a secondary, property-based circuit of commodity value (Lefebvre cited in Ghertner, 2014). We argue that this stems in part from the legacy of planning for small industry. The fact that the initial conditions of industrial development during socialist planning were not Fordist in nature, and that the government planned for an ecosystem of industries of different scales, has led to a diversity of outcomes in this industrial region.

The role of governance, planning and local politics

The case of Rajajinagar allows us to see industrial decline that is associated with the informalisation and degradation of work, but also the replacement of stable industrial work with other kinds of economies that provide opportunities for lower middle-classes and the poor to retain a foothold in an otherwise speculative city that would further push them to the margins. These spaces are not attractive for speculative purposes, and therefore remain invisible from the gaze of planners, who continue to funnel new infrastructure investments to the eastern and northern parts of the city (Bangalore Development Authority, 2017).

The role of local politics is equally important in understanding these shifts. The BBMP emerges as an essential stakeholder with a set of local relationships that enable various different actors to generate value from land through its legitimising actions. These go beyond just the realm of plans and the legal/illegal framework. The Rajajinagar Industrial Town was originally governed by an industrial body, the KSSIDC and S-Palaya and D-Nagar were governed by village panchayats. Both of these are now governed by the urban local body, BBMP. For S-Palaya and D-Nagar, access to infrastructure such as roads and power are daily negotiations between BBMP and industrialists, even though they are now required to pay taxes.

Within the industrial town, while some plots along the main road of the industrial town were given trade licences by BBMP to operate Kalyana Mantapas (which are renewed on an annual basis), other plots behind the main road that are now attempting to convert from industrial sites are being denied these permits. Therefore, in choosing how to allocate these trade licences, BBMP officials are creating an uneven terrain of spatial value (Roy, 2009b) allowing some to operate profitable enterprises on these lands and not others.

In this case, the main violation seems to be one of land use, of having commercial uses on industrially zoned land. While most of our respondents, residents, industrialists and some state government departments, viewed this as illegal or informal in some ways, some others, mainly the Kalyana Mantapa owners and some former industrialists, argued that there was no issue with the operation of wedding halls, since that was another kind of industry. Further, since BBMP was awarding trade licences, this seemed like it awarded them some legitimacy by the state. Therefore, we see BBMP as a stakeholder that is also partaking in, or extracting its share from, the precarious value that is being generated in these transformed economies, through the selective allocation of trade licences for Kalyana Mantapas, and through negotiations that the home-based industries have to constantly undertake in order to secure basic infrastructure. It also creates the conditions to sustain a terrain of informality (Bhan, 2013).

Thus we see that there is substantial unevenness in the trajectories of industrial transition in Rajajinagar, representative of the transformation of the city’s industrial economy at large. But rather than a tale of dispossession and abandonment, there are various kinds of economic activities that continue, enabled by the legacy of planning histories and the socio-political milieu of the neighbourhood. The industrial economy has transformed from being planned and enjoying state support, into one that persists beyond the realm of the state. This informalised realm produces precarious livelihoods and flexible local economies. In parallel, commercialisation of former industrial land is contingent on informal planning mechanisms and the logics of the local political economy.

Revisiting theory: Neoliberal industrial transformation and ‘industrial destabilisation’

The case of Rajajinagar as outlined above allows us to make two main theoretical contributions. One, the case brings out shifts at a neighbourhood scale that go beyond the existing literature on neoliberal transformations in Indian cities, which tend to focus on processes of financialisation and real estate speculation on the one hand, and on marginalisation, vulnerability and informal housing on the other. It brings out a pattern of change centred around the economic decisions of middle-class, middle-caste groups, how they interact with local politics and leverage the ownership of small parcels of land to run service businesses catering to local populations. It also shows how the legacy of planning for industrialisation in core city areas creates patterns of settlement that might be difficult for speculative real estate capital to disrupt.

Two, the case also allows us to assess the limitations of deindustrialisation as a framework to analyse these changes, and to arrive at our modified framework, that of ‘industrial destabilisation’. The Rajajinagar case brings into focus the following aspects that industrial destabilisation is able to capture more precisely than deindustrialisation. One, it focuses on the decline of the engineering industry, which was not accompanied by absolute declines of industrial jobs at the city scale. In fact, the absolute employment in manufacturing at the city scale increased rapidly between 1991 and 2011, largely driven by a massive expansion of the garment industry connected to global supply chains (Census of India, 1991, 2001, 2011). However, the composition of industrial employment is radically different from the pre-1991 profile, being substantially more informalised and feminised (Kumar, 2014). Additionally, the people who might have lost jobs in technical and engineering fields could not find reemployment in the garment industry, which predominantly hired young women workers, particularly migrants from outside Bangalore.

In parallel, there has been a relative decline in the overall share of industrial workers in total workers as the share of employment in the service industries has increased rapidly since the early 1990s, and as industrial work has faded as a priority for planning and for the imagination of the city.

The second aspect of the case that sets it apart from deindustrialisation is that this was not an outright closure of all the firms in the engineering industry, although some of them moved to the peripheries of the city. This led to a disruption in supply chains and the industrial ecosystem in this part of the city, creating the conditions for the closure of many dependent SMEs, and an intense set of changes at the neighbourhood scale.

Three, there has been an intensification in the informalisation of production, with an increase in subcontracting driven by pressures of efficiency and competition.

Four, the case of Rajajinagar demonstrates how industry was not organised along Fordist lines – that there was an ecosystem of firms of different sizes planned for by the state. This eventually shaped the pathways of transformation following closures.

And finally, five, the transformation of Rajajinagar and the neighbouring large industries for other uses demonstrates how the cycles of abandonment and disuse common to deindustrialisation studies were not experienced here. Both the small plots in the government estate and industrial town as well as the larger plots of erstwhile industries found alternative uses in reasonably short spans of time, reflecting the rapidity of change and growth in Southern cities.

Therefore, ‘industrial destabilisation’ can enable us to better capture these trends brought out by the case of Rajajinagar. We argue that this framework can help us understand contemporary phenomena of industrial restructuring in cities of the Global South, and can help establish the comparative research agenda suggested by Schindler et al. (2020) and Pike (2020).

Conclusion

Writing about places such as Rajajinagar, D-Nagar and S-Palaya helps us see other possibilities for the outcomes of industrial restructuring in Southern cities, beyond the now common narratives of redevelopment, gentrification, speculative real estate and finance capital and dispossession. It also helps us articulate the implications of shifts in the labour process such as flexibilisation and informalisation for particular places and neighbourhoods in the city. Despite the decline of stable industrial jobs, the existence of unplanned and informalised residential spaces allows the persistence of engineering production in an informal cluster.

The particular history of Rajajinagar, its socio-cultural profile and the politics of caste and linguistic identity in Karnataka, intersect with economic shifts to produce a certain set of outcomes around the redevelopment of industrial plots. These social and political relations are a key determinant in maintaining different levels of legibility and legitimacy for various economic activities. Further, the legacy of socialist planning in core city areas creates a pattern of settlement that is hard for speculative real estate capital to disrupt.

Finally, the case study of Rajajinagar and Bangalore allows us to develop an alternative framework for analysing these shifts that is more in tune with the nature of industrial transformation in late industrialising countries. When the starting points of industry have been very different from the Fordist system described in ‘deindustrialisation’ studies, and when contemporary industry globally is structured very differently from the Fordist era, a different conceptual vocabulary such as that of ‘industrial destabilisation’ is required to analyse a similar set of shifts unfolding in contemporary cities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Deeksha Rao for research assistance and Tinu Jose, IIHS Geo-Spatial Lab for creating the map image. The authors are very grateful to the editors of the Special Issue as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and encouraging comments on different versions of the paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was completed with support from the PEAK Urban Programme, funded by UKRI’s Global Challenge Research Fund, Grant Ref: ES/P011055/1.

ORCID iD

Aditi Dey

Notes

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