Abstract
Jan Breman’s book is a much-needed corrective to India’s dominant economic growth discourse, politically saturated recently with the so-called success of the ‘Gujarat model of development’. The book engages over five decades of fieldwork in Gujarat from the 1960s, and is painstakingly detailed in its analyses of destitution and immiserisation of those in the lowest echelons of Gujarati society. Breman gives a historical and spatial account of Gujarat’s ‘paupers’ living in conditions of neo-bondage—dispossessed not only of the means of production but also of the freedom to sell their own labour. As the state promotes capitalist growth strategies and callously withdraws from welfare provisions, Breman raises the anxious spectre of an unfolding class-based civil war between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. Capital itself is unable to mop up the surplus population of dispossessed workers, leaving a pauperised mass of people to fend for themselves.
The book is based on Breman’s ethnographic work in four villages around Ahmedabad city and subsequently in the city’s slums, temporary shelters and resettlement colonies. Its comprehensive analyses of rural and urban poverty, told through the historical experiences and lives of migrant workers precariously surviving in the informal economy, offers lessons for understanding the processes of destitution across India.
Breman gives a detailed historical account of the dispossession that compels the landless (often Scheduled Tribes) and marginal farmers from his research area to migrate in search of work. He challenges the idea of mass migration to urban centres as a linear process, emphasising instead circular migration as a prominent feature of the ‘regime of informality’. He argues that there is an influx of temporary labour into villages during seasons when agricultural work is available, or when shelter and work in the city is precarious. This is an understated and understudied phenomenon in migration studies. ‘Home’ for this large contingent of rural migrant workers thus serves as a resting place to recover and recuperate with family, before the next circuit of migration for sheer survival.
The withdrawal and neglect of state welfare mechanisms in Gujarat has left this large population dangerously destitute and immiserised. With a few exceptions, the rural poor in the villages of his study have not departed from their colonies. The uncertainty of regular and secure employment in the urban economy keeps bringing them back. This population has to stay ready and footloose, available to work as agricultural labourers, construction workers or to take up any work that comes their way. Skilling is avoidable lest they get stuck in a particular occupation; staying footloose is a crucial coping mechanism. Large-scale deskilling and insecurity, low wage rates, poor inspection of labour conditions and the deregulation of labour laws have compounded their situation.
The living conditions in ‘illegal’ urban slums aggravates insecurity as they are prone to evictions and slum demolitions, often losing precious savings and the bare minimum household goods essential for survival. The story of the temporary shelter at Ganeshnagar is illustrative. Close to the city’s largest waste disposal belt, Ganeshnagar is also immediately adjacent to the electricity substation with high tension wires overhead, posing severe health risks for residents. Evicted slum dwellers were dumped here in trucks in 2006 with their meagre belongings to make way for the Sabarmati riverfront development. Given its temporary status, basic facilities have been missing and things have not improved over the years. Breman estimates that over 3000 families lived in Ganeshnagar between 2007 and 2014. Most inhabitants do not enjoy any livelihood security. Some are self-employed as rickshaw drivers, hawkers, vendors and waste collectors. Working conditions entail hard labour; thus, it is often that older men, women, the ailing and sometimes younger men while away time in the camp as work becomes an occasional activity. Income from labour is about a half to a third lower than in the city, while the cost of living is higher. Welfare entitlements have become inaccessible due to high costs of travel to their earlier residences as their entitlements were registered in that locality. All of this reinforces their pauperisation. The situation in the permanent resettlement site of Vatwa at the edge of Ahmedabad is not much better. While two-roomed apartments with a kitchen and a toilet have been allotted to the few ‘eligible’ families with proofs of residence at the time of eviction, the basic facilities are lacking and the construction is poor. The families are unable to repay scheduled instalments for the premises as the distance from the city and work opportunities is considerable. Vatwa’s residents are mainly low-skilled, and are poorly paid. Conditions in clandestine shelters are worse, marked by extreme deprivation. This is where the poorest—often Scheduled Tribe—migrants find shelter to avoid attracting attention. Any effort at collective mobilisation is fragile, and ‘employers prefer labour from elsewhere because migrants—often attached in a state of neo-bondage—are not only cheaper to recruit and maintain, but also easier to discipline’ (p. 148).
Drawing somewhat awkwardly from Wikipedia for the explanation of the term ‘pauperism’, Breman draws parallels with 19th century English history, when a large population was immiserised as a result of the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution. Social Darwinists of the time argued against the poor laws providing relief to paupers unable to fend for themselves. Tocqueville, among those expounding the moral hazards of public welfare, nevertheless argued in favour of private charity and sharing of resources to mitigate the wretched inequalities of the time. The processes do not correspond except as different historical manifestations of capitalist development. Yet Breman warns that in the withdrawal of the Indian state from welfare commitments and the disdain of the wealthy towards India’s paupers, there is a distinctly social Darwinist ideology at work that blames the poor for their condition.
Around 30 million migrant workers formed India’s ‘floating workforce’ at the turn of the 21st century. Breman creates a compelling account of the conditions that likely confronts this large majority of the Indian population denied citizenship rights and basic welfare support. A central message of the book is that this immense pauperisation carries within it the potential for intense conflict that threatens Indian society.
Some stylistic issues in the book include large block quotes from reports, other authors and Breman’s previous work. The text frequently shifts from the analysis of particular phenomena in Gujarat to national and global issues without adequately building the flow of argument. There are some summary endorsements of arguments made by other authors that would have benefitted working through in greater detail based on Breman’s historical work. These include the argument of ‘expulsion’ as dispossession that implicitly invokes an ideal historical condition that Breman’s work refutes, and ‘accumulation by dispossession’ as involving only state force, when the dispossession that Breman chronicles is not always enacted through force. Reliance on Wikipedia definitions for terms such as ‘pauperism’ (p. 4) and ‘smart city’ (p. 155) were avoidable.