Workers on the Road: The India Story From Odisha

Description

With persistent informalisation and rising precarity, workers in contemporary India experience a layered and differentiated reality. For a substantial majority of workers, the search for decent work and a secure livelihood has remained elusive, despite the steady economic progress in the post-reform decades. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the underlying reality of India’s labour market. This book presents a substantive engagement with the changing world of work in India, from a distinct regional perspective. The varied experiences of vulnerable workers in and from Odisha during the COVID-19 pandemic are analysed from a grounded, gender-sensitive, socially inclusive, and labour-centric perspective. Rather than treating the pandemic as an isolated and transient experience, the contributions in the book situate it in the larger context of the political economy of transformation in Odisha. Combining the analysis of available secondary data with that from primary field research, both in Odisha and the destination areas of migrant labour beyond Odisha, the book provides a comprehensive understanding of the changing labour relations in India. Addressing a range of cross-cutting themes and concerns, such as the historical experiences of famine, extractive development, new forms of migration, gendered implications of mobility, health and morbidity, workers’ rights and the enduring lessons from the pandemic, the book will be helpful for researchers across disciplines, public policy experts, development practitioners and readers interested in labour issues.

Deepak K Mishra teaches at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Swarnamayee Tripathy, a former Professor in Public Administration at Utkal University, is currently the Director, Development Research Institute, Bhubaneswar.