| Popis: |
In this chapter D’Costa critically examines both the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of India’s employment challenges to assess whether the Indian state is in a position to make a dent in India’s growing employment deficit. This is in spite of the efforts made in creating the world’s largest employment program in the countryside. Using a political economy framework, he offers an institutional perspective as to why plentiful good jobs are hard to come by in India despite the recent high rates of economic growth. He argues that the deeply dualistic employment structure with a relatively small share of highly paid tradeable services jobs and a vast pool of insecure informal sector jobs are a result of “compressed capitalism” that contributes to India’s uneven development. Compression arises from a stalled agrarian transition, state-sponsored leapfrogging of select sectors within the broader truncated industrialization process and a persistent petty commodity producer (PCP) sector. Both institutional and structural legacies in the context of contemporary capitalist dynamics constrain an agrarian transition and instead encourage capital and technology bias in industry, thereby sustaining an expansive PCP sector. The chapter shows that notwithstanding the government’s employment goals they remain unrealistically lofty not just because of state incapacity but also due to the structural imperatives of global capitalism that substantially limits the policy space in a deregulated and liberal economic environment. At the minimum, to accomplish the employment goals, the state needs to be recast differently, which is more in line with rebalancing the state–business relationship in favor of employment-driven policies. |
