West Bengal (WB) ranks high among the 15 major states of India, where there is still a disturbing persistence of underage marriage among girls, leading to early motherhood as a consequence. The ...article explores the reasons for this in the context of social and economic conditions in the state. The article argues that more than poverty and illiteracy, the unavailability of new employment opportunities for women and girls in the rural and urban areas of the state explains why parents do not have the incentive to invest in more schooling or the higher education of their daughters. The article is mainly based on secondary data with occasional references to some primary evidence from a recent survey done by the author.
Despite major economic and political changes in the last two centuries, the incidence of underage marriage of girls as well as their widowhood is much higher in West Bengal than in any other parts of ...India. The incidence of widowhood was very high in Bengal among the major colonial provinces in the first half of the twentieth century. Many historians argue that marriage practices of the higher castes gradually percolated downwards, and many intermediary cultivating castes as well as lower castes started following the norms of child marriage and ban on widow remarriage as a means of attaining social respectability during the closing decades of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century. This article tries to explore whether the very high incidence of widowhood in colonial Bengal in the first half of the twentieth century could also have been linked to the very nature of women’s labour force participation which in turn was largely determined by the nature of the agrarian economy.
The last available census estimated around 10 per cent of total urban working women in India are concentrated in the low paid domestic services such as cleaning, cooking, and taking care of the ...children and the elderly. This is found to be much higher in certain parts of India, emerging as the single most important avenue for urban females, surpassing males in the service since the 1980s.
By applying an imaginative and refreshing mix of disciplinary approaches ranging from economic models of the household, empirical analysis and literary conventions, this book analyses the changing labour economy in post-partition West Bengal. It explains how and why women and girl children have replaced this traditionally male bias in the gender segregated domestic service industry since the late 1940s, and addresses the question of whether this increase in vulnerable individuals working in domestic service, the growth of the urban professional middle class in the post liberalization period, and the increasing incidences of reported abuses of domestics, in urban middleclass homes in the recent years, are related.
Covering five decades of the history of gender and labour in India, this book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of gender and labour relations, development studies, economics, history, and women and gender studies.
This paper attempts to see how a particular labour market (domestic service), a traditionally male domain, became segregated both by gender and age in the post-partition Indian state of West Bengal, ...and mainly in its capital city Calcutta. It argues that the downward trend in industrial job opportunities in post independent West Bengal, accompanied by the large scale immigration of men, women and children from bordering East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), led to a general decline in wage rate for those in domestic service. Poor refugee women, in their frantic search for a means of survival, gradually drove out the males of the host population who were engaged in domestic service in urban West Bengal by offering to work for a very low wage and often for no wage at all. As poor males from the neighbouring states of Bihar, Orissa and the United Provinces constituted historically a substantial section of Calcutta domestic workers, it was mainly this group who were replaced by refugee women. The second stage in the changing profile of domestic service since the 1970s in urban West Bengal was arguably set by migrating girl children from different parts of the state to Calcutta city in search of employment. This is probably why West Bengal had the highest girl children's work-participation rate in urban India in 2001.
Industry, Labour and the State Chakravarty, Deepita; Bose, Indranil
Journal of South Asian development,
10/2011, Letnik:
6, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Despite the pursuit of similar industrial policies during the post-1990s, Indian states have revealed divergent outcomes in industrial growth. Such divergence suggests different levels of policy ...implementation which itself is a result of the interplay of formal and informal institutions, historically shaped. We try to ex-plain this divergence in the context of the evolution of state–business relations in West Bengal, a coastal state in Eastern India, and unique among Indian states not only by virtue of being ruled by a Leftist regime for an uninterrupted 34 years (1977—May, 2011), but also by having witnessed a turnaround of sorts in the outlook of the former government towards private capital within this period. Our findings suggest that it is the peculiarity of institutional behaviour that determines the policy outcomes in the state. The rigidities in political as well as economic institutions in the state are prompting us to look at West Bengal as a classic case of ‘institutional stickiness’ leading to ‘path dependency’.
This article attempts to understand women's labour market behaviour in the context of export-oriented garment manufacturing in India, particularly women's decision to work and their alleged aversion ...to unionism. Asian women's submissiveness in the labour market can hardly be the result of ‘Oriental docility’ in every case. We question this assumption by looking at a small sample of 25 women in garment manufacturing firms in Hyderabad, India, and seek other explanations for women's lack of interest in unions, and note the pressures that affect them.
Studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated that poor women have been the worst sufferers in terms of pay cuts and job losses and have been the hardest hit also at the household ...level. They have had to bear the brunt of constrained household budgets and domestic violence during pandemic-induced lockdowns and restrictions. This chapter on the gender impact of the pandemic in Delhi, India, seeks to explore whether women who have achieved some agency from their work gain a stronger capacity for intra-household bargaining and are less likely to face household-level discrimination. We also try to understand whether the extent, severity, and nature of discrimination within the household may change if women have better chances than men to retain or get back their jobs. Empirically, we rely on 31 interviews with women domestic workers, conducted inperson in Delhi.
The factor price-equalization theorem predicts a convergence of returns in the long run to capital and labour across trading partners when trade is liberalized. Thus, developing countries, which tend ...to export labour-intensive goods, should experience the benefits of a rise in relatively unskilled-labour wages when they undertake trade reforms. However, this does not seem to have occurred in practice, at least for a number of developing and emerging market nations. In this paper, a model is set up to explain this deviation from the results of the pure theory of international trade, drawing upon the developments in the Indian information technology sector, specifically its distinctive labour input requirements.
Earlier studies held the militant trade unionism of the 1970s and the early 1980s responsible for the increasing importance of unorganised manufacturing activities in West Bengal. This paper argues ...instead that this importance of unorganised manufacturing was not so much the result of weakening trade unionism and a vulnerable workforce, but the outcome of an implicit understanding between the trade unions and the management. This understanding allowed wage growth to continue in the absence of productivity growth, alongside the gradual reduction of permanent workers in favour of contract workers, and the farming out of production to the unorganised sector by firms.
