B G Kumar Memorial Lecture by Prof. Barbara Harris White.

A Different Approach to Informality

ABSTRACT
India’s informal economy is established as the largest in the world – comprising almost all employment and probably just under half of GDP, though this is thought to be declining. The theoretical genealogy of informal activity – as with the categories of the state which academics have to use – is marked by binaries and duality (unorganised, unprotected, unincorporated etc). In this lecture I’ll explore a different conjecture: that, irrespective of their state categorisation, informal economic activity negotiates the politics of selective enforcement of state-regulative laws and the politics incentivising selective adherence (voluntary) and selective compliance (for fear of penalties) to them. I use an experiment with AI, corroborated with material from seven mainly rural cases using my own fieldwork, to make an initial and incomplete exploration. It indicates that the informal economy is pervasive.

Barbara Harriss-White, FAcSS, is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies and Emeritus Fellow Wolfson College Oxford University – also Research Fellow at the Max Weber Foundation for South Asian Studies, New Delhi and chair of the Young Scholars’ Seminar of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies, Bangalore. Committed to long-term field research in (agrarian) political economy, in the study of informal capitalism and in dimensions of deprivation and waste. Forty two doctoral students, as many post docs and as many (co)authored and edited books; 143 papers and 153 chapters. Former Director of Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford and founder-director of Oxford’s M Phil in Development Studies and its Contemporary South Asian Studies programme in Area Studies.