Start
October 29, 2021 - 3:30 pm
End
October 29, 2021 - 5:00 pm
National Research Programme on Plantation Development Webinar Series
Topic: ‘Unfree’ Plantation Labour in Globalising India: Insights from a Field Survey in Assam
Speaker : Prof. Deepak K Mishra, CSRD, JNU
Moderator: Dr. Jayaseelan Raj, CDS
Abstract: Despite the many significant changes in the structure of the plantation economies in India in the past decades, the conditions of plantation labour remain deplorable. An aspect of the ‘crisis’ of the tea sector in India that has received scant attention is the ‘crisis of survival faced by the labour households dependent upon the tea plantations. This presentation will attempt to provide a broad overview of the conditions of labour in the tea plantations, particularly focusing on upper Assam. It will examine the changes in the livelihoods of ‘tea labour’ households by specifically looking at the role of the historical experience of deprivation in shaping the continuing patterns of mobility and immobility. Finally, the paper will discuss the debates around the question of unfree labour under contemporary global capitalism, linking it to the experiences of exclusion, segmentation and adverse incorporation by the ‘tea labour community’ residing within and outside the tea gardens of Assam.
Prof. Deepak K Mishra is Professor of Economics at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi. His research interests are in the areas of the political economy of agrarian change, rural livelihoods and agrarian institutions, plantation labour and labour migration. He has co-authored The Unfolding Crisis in Assam’s Tea Plantations: Employment and Occupational Mobility (Routledge, 2012) and has edited Internal Migration in Contemporary India (Sage, 2016). Recently, he has co-edited Rethinking Economic Development in Northeast India: The Emerging Dynamics (Routledge, 2017) and Land and Livelihoods in Neoliberal India (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2020). Before joining JNU, Prof Mishra taught at the Department of Economics, Rajiv Gandhi University and contributed to the first Human Development Report of Arunachal Pradesh (GoAP- UNDP-Planning Commission, 2005) and Arunachal Pradesh Development Report (Academic Foundation, 2009). He was awarded the First Sanjay Thakur Memorial Young Labour Economist Award, by the Indian Society of Labour Economics in 2002. During 2008-9 he was a Commonwealth Visiting Fellow, Department of International Development, University of Oxford, UK. In 2012, Prof Mishra was ICCR Chair Professor, International Centre for South Asian Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow. He was a Visiting Fellow at the York Centre for Asian Research, York University, Toronto in 2019.