---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: avinash shahi <[email protected]> Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 22:40:28 +0530 Subject: Invitation to a workshop: In/equality and social mobility in contemporary India To: jnuvision <[email protected]> Cc: sayeverything <[email protected]>
Programme and Abstracts are given below Date: 7th-8th November 2013, Venue: Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Organisers: The Department of Sociology, Delhi University and the Centre of Global South Asia Studies, Copenhagen University Schedule Social Mobility and Inequality in post-reform India 7-8th November 2013 Programme 7th November 2013 10.00 – 10.30 Welcome and Introduction Nandini Sundar and Ravinder Kaur 10.30 – 11.00 Inequality and Social Mobility: Introductory Comments Andre Beteille 11.00-11.30 Tea Break 11.30-1.00 Chair: Satish Deshpande Economic Mobility in neoliberal India: an analysis of class, migration and occupational mobility Vamsi Vakulabharanam Patterns of Social (Im)mobility – an Indian perspective Divya Vaid 1.00 – 2.00 Lunch 2.00 – 3.30 Chair: Kiran Bhatty Crossing the Rubicon of Backwardness: Analysing Effects of public employment on discriminated social groups in India Kaustav Banerjee Markets and mobility in the emancipation of Dalits: evidence from the Hindi heartland D. Shyam Babu 3.30 – 4.00 Tea Break 4.00 – 5.00 Chair: Ravinder Kaur Battling for dignity: mobility, identity and Dalit initiatives for change Surinder Singh Jodhka 8th November 2013 10.00 – 11.30 Chair: Amita Baviskar Engineering (In)equality: Social and Spatial Strategies in Coastal Andhra Pradesh Carol Upadhya Technology, mobility, democracy: from kattumaram to trawler in a south Indian fishery Aparna Sundar 11.30 – 12.00 Tea Break 12.00 - 12.45 Poor Images: Mediating the Other in Post-reform India Ravinder Kaur 12.45 – 2.00 Lunch Break 2.00 – 3.30 Chair: Rita Brara A Culture of Organised Servility: Working at the bottom of the interactive service sector in India’s private corporate economy Nandini Gooptu Poverty, Kamzori and Tension: Embodied inequalities and class experiences in a Delhi slum Emilija Zabiliute 3.30 – 4.00 Tea Break 4.00 – 5.30 Wrap up Comments. Chair: Nandini Sundar Amita Baviskar and Kiran Bhatty Social Mobility and Inequality in post-reform India 7-8th November 2013 Participants Amita Baviskar, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi D Shyam Babu, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi Kaustav Banerjee, Centre for the Study of Discrimination & Exclusion, School of Social Sciences, JNU. Kiran Bhatty, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi Nandini Gooptu, Department of International Development at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Antony's College. Surinder Jodhka, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, JNU Ravinder Kaur, Centre of Global South Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen Aparna Sundar, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. Nandini Sundar, Department of Sociology, Delhi University Carol Upadhya, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore Divya Vaid, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, JNU Vamsi Vakulabharanam, School of Economics, University of Hyderabad Emilija Zabiliute, University of Copenhagen, Centre of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, Centre of Global South Asian Studies Abstracts Surinder Singh Jodhka: Battling for Dignity: Mobility, Identity and Dalit Initiatives for Change Based on a questionnaire survey of 81 respondents and 27 qualitative interviews, the paper attempts to explore different dimension of the social and political work being done by urban middle-class Dalit activists in the city of Delhi. Locating their “politics” in their personal trajectories of mobility and mobilizations, the paper looks at the articulation and imagination of Dalit identity by the urban activists; their personal experiences of caste and discrimination; the growing class distance between them and the communities of their origin; the processes of negotiation with their modern settings of work and the burden of caste; the nature and forms of their activities; their visions of alternative society and challenges they confront at different levels in their work as Dalit activists; their own notions of caste system; the challenges of reconciling “communitarian” activism around the notion of “Dalit” with the modern ideas of civil society and development which are premised on the notion of universalism; and the politics of community identity formation and its implications for their larger political agenda of caste annihilation. Aparna Sundar: Technology, mobility, democracy: from kattumaram to trawler in a south Indian fishery Writing on technology in India (see, for instance, Rohan D’Souza ed.) has tended to see it as a “problem” examining questions of risk (nuclear energy, dams, biotechnology), environmental impact, or equity / appropriateness. In relation to democracy, technological change has largely been understood as anti-democratic, raising issues of displacement, secrecy, corruption, concentration of knowledge and control, unequal access and benefits. There is recent writing on cell phones (Jeffrey and Doron) that challenges this, but this is a very specific type of technology and, of course, there has been some critical attention to IT work in terms of its relationship to social mobility (for e.g., Upadhya and Vasavi eds.). This paper takes its cue from the concept note for this workshop, to think about less prominent technologies as vectors of (in) equality and mobility. The fishing villages of Kanyakumari district in southern Tamil Nadu have seen a significant degree of upward mobility, with incomes rising due to new markets, and escalating prices for fish and seafood. They have also seen a dramatic technological shift – from kattumarams powered by hand and sail to massive fuel depended craft, GPS, echosounders, cell phones, etc. Yet, the story of technology is either subsumed within that of markets, or moderinization, or written of in the tropes described above – resource collapse, unequal access, and indebtedness. Can we think separately of the complex ways in which technology creates logics and effects of its own, increasing physical mobility, efficiency, ease, speed, efficacy? How do the assemblages of technology, markets for input and output, state and NGOs, potential and declining fish resources, and adaptive, creative fishermen, generate their own publics? There is also the parallel landscape of technologies in the domestic economy – flushing toilets, gas stoves, fridges, mixer-grinders, microwaves, sometimes washing machines, electric fans, TVs, etc. What are their effects and affects? This paper explores these questions. It aims, not to point one-sidedly to the liberatory potential of new technologies, but to move beyond seeing them as necessarily destructive, or having inegalitarian consequences, and to think more expansively about the ways they reshape ideas of space, community, distance, power, aspiration and possibility, and pose new political problems – of credit, regulation, inputs, fuel, labour relations. While careful not to make any claims of technological determinism, the paper argues that the story of mobility and change cannot be understood without attention to the role of changing technologies. References D’Souza, Rohan. 2013. Environment, Technology and Development: Critical and Subversive Essays. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan. Jeffrey, Robin and Assa Doron. 2012. Cell Phone Nation. New Delhi: Hachette. Upadhya, Carol, and A.R. Vasavi eds. 2007. In an Outpost of the Global Economy: Work and Workers in India’s Information Technology Industry. Delhi: Routledge. Bio Aparna Sundar is Associate Professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. She works on issues of labour, ecological conflict, and democracy, in the fisheries, and more broadly. Markets and Spatial Mobility in the Emancipation of Dalits: Evidence from the Hindi Heartland A paper to be presented at the workshop on Social Mobility and Inequality, 7-8 November 2013, New Delhi By D Shyam Babu Senior Fellow Centre for Policy Research New Delhi ABSTRACT Our survey among nearly twenty thousand Dalit households in two blocks of Uttar Pradesh had enabled us to report how Dalits broke out of the shackles of caste and feudal oppression in order to chart a new course for themselves. The story of radical transformation appeared too good to be true even to us. We then carried out a small sample survey in Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan to test how far our UP results could hold, and if so, whether we could generalize our main findings on social change. The sample survey has vindicated our conclusion that markets and migration have unleashed changes that turn rural power structures upside down, keeping the window of opportunity open for Dalits to determine their destiny. The two surveys throw up several challenges, both intellectual and public policy-oriented. What are the implications of these findings? How should Dalit activists, intellectuals and their leaders respond? Despite these challenges our results present a future that is more amenable to changes in favour of Dalits. Mr. D. Shyam Babu is a Senior Fellow, the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. He holds an M.Phil degree in International Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University. He had had a brief stint with business journalism before becoming a full-time researcher. He was a Fellow at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies during 2002 and 2011. His publications include, in addition to dozens of articles in newspapers on contemporary issues, a book on Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a couple of co-edited volumes on identity politics in India, Dalits and Social Justice, Caste in everyday life. He has been collaborating with Devesh Kapur and Chandra Bhan Prasad in researching into how economic reforms have been engendering social change, especially their impact on Dalits. Crossing the Rubicon of Backwardness: Analysing effects of public employment on discriminated social groups in India Kaustav Banerjee The phrase ‘rubicon of backwardness’ has been used to define the creamy layer in the ongoing debate on reservations in India. I juxtapose the legal and institutional definitions of backwardness with the experiential understanding of what it means for members of discriminated social groups to cross over. The pathway which is analysed in greater detail is that of modern public employment opportunities. Theoretically, public employment could be assumed to provide an opportunity to augment income and status, especially in a society with a history of rigid occupational stratification closely intertwined with status. I argue that status effects are far more important than income effects in this regard. I define status not just as the perception of self-respect but the ability (in varying degrees) to assert power especially in the everyday realm. Using this lens, I probe the relationship between developmentalism, electoral democracy and employment opportunities that are available to certain social groups. Short Bio: Kaustav Banerjee is currently Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Study of Discrimination & Exclusion, School of Social Sciences, JNU. He is an economist specializing in agrarian systems and developmental policy. He has 7 years of field based research experience in the most backward districts of the country and has also been involved with the policy formulation and implementation process of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005. Prior to joining the Centre, he was teaching at the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum. Earlier, he co-ordinated an Economic Research Unit on Rainfed Agrarian-Livestock Systems in India and was based at the Centre for Studies in Science Policy, JNU. Additionally, he had been an Advisor to the Core Group of the Socio-Economic & Caste Census, 2011, Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India which involved formulation of the pilot methodology and training of state level enumerators. Economic Mobility in Neo-liberal India: An analysis of Class, Migration and Occupational Mobility Vamsi Vakulabharanam (School of Economics, University of Hyderabad) In this paper/presentation, I portray the Indian experience since 1980s along three axes. First, I address the question of the heightening Indian inequality in class and caste terms. Inequality is primarily measured in consumption or wealth terms for this analysis. I separate the rural and urban sectors and show how the relative gains from growth have accrued to different classes/castes across the country. This has been an extremely skewed process over the last three decades. Second, I present an analysis of migration in class terms to see if migration (rural-rural, rural-urban and urban-urban) has contributed largely to a reduction/heightening of inequality. The finding is somewhat curious and counter-intuitive in the sense that migrants as a group and as comprising of different classes have tended to do better than non-migrants (and equivalent classes) at the destination. I explain this counter-intuitive phenomenon through the logic of other endowments that are possessed by these different groups. However, the better performance of the migrants has only further heightened the tendencies towards inequalities in India during this period. Third, I analyze the inter-generational occupational mobility to see if there is evidence for greater social mobility through the heightened presence of markets in our midst. All in all, in an overall context of heightening inequality in India, it appears as if the routes to upward social mobility of different kinds have not dominated over the forces that perpetuate social distance. This marks the era of the tryst with neo-liberal markets as one that has facilitated a great concentration of income and wealth across India. Paper Title: Patterns of Social (Im)mobility – an Indian perspective Divya Vaid Abstract: Changing patterns of intergenerational social mobility have long been treated as an indicator of the ‘openness’ of a society and of persisting inequalities. While past research (Vaid and Heath, 2010, Kumar, Heath and Heath, 2002) has provided an overview of the patterns of intergenerational social mobility at the national level, few studies have as yet deconstructed the specific patterns of social mobility by caste/community, and the role of education as a mediator of this mobility at both the national and the more local level. It has been argued that as ‘merit’ based criteria like educational qualifications gain in salience we expect to see a weakening of the link between class-origins and class-destinations leading to increased social mobility. Whether we see any indication of these processes in two urban areas in India (Delhi and Patna) is a question that is explored in this paper. That is, have the patterns of mobility indeed changed over time? Does education play a role independent of caste or community on the chance to be upwardly mobile? Are these patterns distinct for women? This paper will use both a large nationally representative data (NES 2009) as well as a two-city dataset from the Education and Social Mobility Study (ESMS 2012) to critically observe not only the overall patterns of intergenerational social mobility, and the interaction of caste and gender, but, it will also attempt to study the impact of education as a possible mechanism of mobility over time. Bio: Divya Vaid is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Her main research interests are social stratification, social mobility and inequality; educational inequalities and social research methods. Divya is currently working on a two-year ICSSR funded project on the impact of educational attainment on social mobility chances in two Indian cities. ENGINEERING (IN)EQUALITY SOCIAL AND SPATIAL STRATEGIES OF MOBILITY IN COASTAL ANDHRA PRADESH Carol Upadhya National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore Abstract for Workshop on Equality and Mobility Delhi University, 7-8 November 2013 Coastal Andhra is one of the regions where the privatization of professional education first took root in India, and today it hosts numerous private institutions – especially engineering colleges. Consequently, the region became one of the major sources of Indian software engineers during the IT boom, many of whom were ‘bodyshopped’ abroad during the 1990s and early 2000s. These trends created a new culture of migration in the region, in which spatial mobility via engineering education and an IT job is seen as a prime avenue for achieving economic and social mobility. Because it was mainly the propertied classes (consisting mainly of the dominant landowning castes) who could afford to invest in engineering degrees for their sons (and more recently, daughters), this strategy has worked as a new mode of accumulation for the regional elites. For example, IT professionals working abroad often reinvest their earnings in agricultural land or urban real estate, thereby augmenting the hold of already wealthy groups over land and property in the region. However, a countervailing pattern of mobility ‘from below’ has recently emerged, which replicates the same strategy. With the ‘IT craze’ spreading widely through Andhra society, lower caste and less wealthy families from villages and small towns across the region have invested in private English-medium education for their children (especially sons), with the ultimate aim of getting them into engineering or similar courses. In addition, young people from SC, OBC, and BPL categories have entered engineering and other professional colleges in large numbers through the state government’s fee reimbursement scheme. This trend may appear to pose a challenge to the power of the dominant class and castes by destabilizing their monopoly over key forms of cultural capital. But the rapid expansion in the number of engineering colleges has meant that the quality of education in many cases is poor, leading to the production of large numbers of engineering graduates who are regarded as ‘unemployable’ – at least in the kinds of jobs they desire. The larger social outfall of the thwarted mobility aspirations of these young people, many of whom are the first in their families to receive higher education, remains to be seen. The spread of higher education together with the IT boom and a new culture of migration in Coastal Andhra have provided new avenues for upward mobility, but at the same time have helped to reproduce long-standing structures of inequality. The paper will explore these diverse trajectories of social and spatial mobility in Coastal Andhra over the last three decades by examining the mobilization, and immobilization, of disadvantaged rural youth by new educational opportunities, against the background of the successful mobility strategies employed by software engineers who come mainly from the propertied class and dominant caste groups. A Culture of Organised Servility: Working at the bottom of the interactive service sector in India’s private corporate economy India’s expanding private corporate sector now promises to provide increasing opportunities for employment and upward economy mobility, even to those on the lowest rungs of the labour force. In a burgeoning consumer economy, the demand for labour has risen dramatically in such areas as customer relations, hospitality, housekeeping and security provision, where the workforce is engaged in the ‘immaterial labour’ of producing interactive services, rather than in manufacturing material goods. The key requirement here is not manual toil, but emotional or affective work and embodied performance to please and serve consumers. Workers accordingly receive organised forms of training in soft skills and personal grooming, while novel forms of labour management techniques are also purported to be deployed to suit the distinctive needs of the interactive service sector. Work of this nature has offered a degree of economic improvement to many who would otherwise face unemployment or under-employment, and also stoked workers’ aspirations for participation and enfranchisement in the private corporate economy. At the same time, however, pre-existing coercive forms of labour control persist, and new forms of class difference, a culture of servility and institutionalised and routinized forms of subordination and humiliation have emerged, that are often resonant of hierarchical relations based on the social institutions of caste or gender. I have already sent you my bio, but here it is again: Nandini Gooptu is Head of the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Antony's College. She teaches history and politics at the Department of International Development, the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, and the Department of Politics. Educated in Calcutta and at Cambridge, and trained as a historian, she is the author of 'The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early-Twentieth Century India', published by Cambridge University Press. She is the co-editor of 'India and the British Empire', published by Oxford University Press and the editor of 'Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India', published by Routledge in 2013. While Dr Gooptu's past research has been on colonial India, her current research is concerned with social and political transformation in contemporary India, with a focus on enterprise culture. She has published articles on a variety of subjects, including caste, religion and politics; urban development and politics; poverty, labour, and work. Emilija Zabiliute University of Copenhagen, Centre of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, Centre of Global South Asian Studies Poverty, kamzori and tension: embodied inequalities and experiences of class in a Delhi slum This paper is concerned with the ways in which the urban poor subjectivize and experience structural violence in somatic terms. Poverty, inequality and deprivation in India are under-researched themes from the perspective of the poor and the experiential point of view. Structural violence shapes the everyday lives of the poor and renders them uncertain, precarious and doubtful about the futures. Health and reproduction problems are the biggest challenges for the poor, as they pose them and their families economic challenges which can destroy fragile assets in just one day. But which subjectivities emerge in these settings? How is this precariousness of everyday life embodied? The paper is based on an ethnographic fieldwork in a slum in Delhi suburbs, participant observation and interviews with the slum dwellers, governmental and non-qualified health service providers. As the place is abundant in diverse medical institutions and practices, it suggests the high presence of the health problems and the importance of notion of a healthy body for the urban poor. Yet, as many suffer from health problems and economic deprivation, and uncertainty and worry about the future are the cohorts of the everyday lives, they are subjectified in relation to class, caste and gender categories. The paper focuses on the emic concepts of kamzori and tension that express somatic experiences of the everyday violence. Drawing on an ethnographic data and a previous study in the field (Cohn 1998), it shows how kamzori and tension characterize the embodied selves and are markers of class in a global city. -- Avinash Shahi M.Phil Research Scholar Centre for The Study of Law and Governance Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi India -- Avinash Shahi M.Phil Research Scholar Centre for The Study of Law and Governance Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi India Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. 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