Labour in contemporary South India 1 Isabelle Guérin (Paris I Sorbonne University/Institute of Research for Development, and French Institute of Pondicherry G. Venkatasubramanian (French Institute of Pondicherry) Sébastien Michiels (Université Bordeaux IV, French Institute of Pondicherry) Introduction This chapter is greatly inspired by Barbara Harriss-White’s work on the social regulation of the Indian labour landscape 2 . Harriss-White’s renewed approach to political economics and her intensive field research have shown the extent to which social institutions such as caste, class, gender, age, space, religion and the State affect property rights and transfers, production processes and labour. Her micro- studies highlight processes overlooked by large-scale surveys, showing that markets, just like scarcity, are historical and social, institutionalised processes. She examines the reproduction and evolution of power relationships, and how these are shaped by and constitutive of larger socioeconomic and political dynamics. This is by no means a deterministic form of reasoning however: she discusses the distinctive ways in which institutions evolve, interact and mutually reinforce one another according to local circumstances and the historical period. Our goal has been to adopt such an approach to our work. Our work draws on fieldwork from villages in Tamil Nadu from over the past ten years to examine how labour interrelates with social and political structures, and how it interacts with other forms of economic practices, especially credit. We also consider how variable levels of access to a variety of resources can have a wide range of impacts. We evaluate the specific characteristics and the diversity of local effects, considering phenomena that may escape widescale surveys, while taking the micro-level as indicative of broader structural dynamics. Employment structures in rural India have changed significantly over recent decades. It is well known that agriculture has been steadily declining in terms of both GDP share and employment rates. From 2004 to 2005, just 56.6% of workers worked in agriculture, in contrast to 81.6% in 1983, despite the fact that most of the Indian population still lives in so-called rural areas. Land concentration is now a thing of the past. Nearly two thirds of farmers today are considered ‘marginal farmers’. They own less than 4 acres of land, and are unable to survive on agriculture alone. The proportion of agricultural labourers continues to decline, while that of non-farming labour is increasing (Srivastava 2012). Such decline of agricultural labour has not so far been compensated by growing or prosperous industrial employment. Rural workers, whether they are landless or marginal farmers, survive by combining several sources of livelihood. This is a complex, often precarious process, devoid of any form of social protection. The latest NSSO data indicate that employment informalisation affected 92.38% of all workers in 2004-2005, in contrast to 91.17% in 1999-2000 (Srivastava 2012). Social differentiation is no longer solely determined by land ownership and form of agriculture practiced. Traditional categories such as “poor peasant”, “middle peasant” and “rich peasant” have 1 Field work was carried out between 2004 and 2013 within the Labour, finance and social dynamics research program of the French Institute of Pondicherry. The household survey has been done within the frame of the RUME project, funded by the French National Agency for Research (ANR). Latest field work has been supported by the IOW project (Human Bondage in the Indian Ocean World: Roots, Structure and Transformations) funded by the French National Agency for Research (ANR). 2 Among many references, see for instance Harriss-White (1981, 1996, 2003, 2010a, 2010b). 1