Final Report Summary - UNDERINDIA (The Underbelly of the Indian Boom: Adivasis and Dalits)
In recent decades India, becoming one of the world’s fastest growing major economies, placed economic growth and deregulated markets at the centre of poverty reduction with the belief that they will lead to a trickle down effect that will reach the poor. Critiques argued that the Indian glory is an uncertain one, challenged ideas of ‘inclusive growth’, and warned that most of India’s aggregate growth has led to a rise in incomes at the upper end of the income ladder. The fruits of economic growth have barely reached the poor and everywhere India’s Adivasis (indigenous people) and Dalits (previously called ‘untouchables’), who make up 1 in 25 people in the world, are worse off than all other groups. This Programme of Research on Inequality and Poverty sought to investigate exactly how and why India’s Adivasis and Dalits remain at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy and their fight against this situation.
Long term indepth ethnographic research was carried out by a team of collectively trained anthropologists working closely together in five different sites across the country, for no less than a year in each site, placing the perspectives and experiences of Adivasis and Dalits at the centre of analysis. This was one of the first concerted efforts by a team of anthropologists to work comparatively across different sites and address a collective research question. They relied on anthropology’s core methodology of participant observation whilst collaboratively thinking through their theoretical frameworks through the lens of political economy, designing household surveys, genealogical histories and other common methods, and seeking advice from and developing cross disciplinary conversations with leading Indian economists.
From the heart of the country near the forests of northern Telengana, to the tea plantations of Kerala, the chemical industrial belt of the erstwhile agricultural plains of Tamil Nadu, to the banks of the Narmada River and the high mountains of the Himalayas, the research found that everywhere, compared to neighbouring upper-caste households, it is Adivasis and Dalits who occupy the most precarious rungs of the occupational ladder. The old bounds of village hierarchies are left behind as they have entered into multiple strategies of livelihoods which mix farm work with hard manual labour and in which seasonal circular migration is crucial. But the research found that everywhere Adivasis and Dalits are flung into the most uncertain precarious exploitative informal work conditions in the new economies.
Three processes are shown to be central in keeping Adivasis and Dalits at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchies. First, their entry into new sectors of the economy remains shaped by locally dominant groups, powerful outsiders and the state, so that their historical discrimination continues. Second, the super-exploitation of seasonal casual migrant labour enables capitalists to pitch ethnically and regionally different sections of the labouring classes against each other to squeeze them and undermine their labour power. Third, overlapping forms of oppression based on class, caste, tribe, region and gender divides even what unity might be found across these vulnerable groups to change their circumstances. Moreover, where Dalits and Adivasis work hard to better their conditions despite their fragmentation, they are up against strong enemies, easily targeted as ‘anti-national’, and face violent repercussions, including being beaten, charged with sedition and arrested, or even killed.
See a youtube video on the research as presented in the book ‘Ground Down by Growth’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8Xp2aVGDQQ
And listen to a podcast on Nightmarch. Alpa Shah in conversation with journalist Sonia Faleiro: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nightmarch-among-indias-revolutionary-guerrillas-alpa/id1499818185?i=1000469316150
Long term indepth ethnographic research was carried out by a team of collectively trained anthropologists working closely together in five different sites across the country, for no less than a year in each site, placing the perspectives and experiences of Adivasis and Dalits at the centre of analysis. This was one of the first concerted efforts by a team of anthropologists to work comparatively across different sites and address a collective research question. They relied on anthropology’s core methodology of participant observation whilst collaboratively thinking through their theoretical frameworks through the lens of political economy, designing household surveys, genealogical histories and other common methods, and seeking advice from and developing cross disciplinary conversations with leading Indian economists.
From the heart of the country near the forests of northern Telengana, to the tea plantations of Kerala, the chemical industrial belt of the erstwhile agricultural plains of Tamil Nadu, to the banks of the Narmada River and the high mountains of the Himalayas, the research found that everywhere, compared to neighbouring upper-caste households, it is Adivasis and Dalits who occupy the most precarious rungs of the occupational ladder. The old bounds of village hierarchies are left behind as they have entered into multiple strategies of livelihoods which mix farm work with hard manual labour and in which seasonal circular migration is crucial. But the research found that everywhere Adivasis and Dalits are flung into the most uncertain precarious exploitative informal work conditions in the new economies.
Three processes are shown to be central in keeping Adivasis and Dalits at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchies. First, their entry into new sectors of the economy remains shaped by locally dominant groups, powerful outsiders and the state, so that their historical discrimination continues. Second, the super-exploitation of seasonal casual migrant labour enables capitalists to pitch ethnically and regionally different sections of the labouring classes against each other to squeeze them and undermine their labour power. Third, overlapping forms of oppression based on class, caste, tribe, region and gender divides even what unity might be found across these vulnerable groups to change their circumstances. Moreover, where Dalits and Adivasis work hard to better their conditions despite their fragmentation, they are up against strong enemies, easily targeted as ‘anti-national’, and face violent repercussions, including being beaten, charged with sedition and arrested, or even killed.
See a youtube video on the research as presented in the book ‘Ground Down by Growth’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8Xp2aVGDQQ
And listen to a podcast on Nightmarch. Alpa Shah in conversation with journalist Sonia Faleiro: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nightmarch-among-indias-revolutionary-guerrillas-alpa/id1499818185?i=1000469316150