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Inclusive Growth and Social Change: Formal-Informal-Agrarian Relations in India

Online ISBN:
9780199086818
Print ISBN:
9780199466061
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Inclusive Growth and Social Change: Formal-Informal-Agrarian Relations in India

Saumya Chakrabarti
Saumya Chakrabarti
Associate Professor of Economics at Visva-Bharati (University), Santiniketan, West Bengal, India.
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Published online:
23 June 2016
Published in print:
1 June 2016
Online ISBN:
9780199086818
Print ISBN:
9780199466061
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book questions the projected processes of inclusive growth and structural transformation in India. Deviating from the usual practice, it engages with the received positions of both the orthodox and heterodox discourses using a variety of methods of analyses together. It formulates its critique from the perspective of the vast non-agricultural informal sector. It shows that despite a consistently high growth rate of the economy driven by the formal/modern/capitalistic sectors, most of the informality goes on existing (and even spreading) without substantial improvement in its basic economic conditions. Only a fraction of this informal sector population is capable of reaping the benefits of formal sector growth, with a much larger part constantly reproducing itself at an abysmal level of living. Instead of a much-advocated formal–informal symbiosis, the book explicates the inherent conflicts over and above the projected complementarities. The complexities—arising out of these formal-informal conflicts and complementarities—are sustained/managed through interactions by the capital and the state vis-à-vis the informality, interactions being influenced/conditioned by several socio-political–cultural processes and discourses as well. Thus, the capitalistic formality negotiates with a mostly non-capitalistic informality—with or without the interventions of the state, civil society and other institutions (such as NGOs and academia)—and thereby, the so-called transition is compromised, and a fractured/distorted structure of capitalism is an obvious outcome.

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