Indian Labour in the Post-Liberalisation Period is considered widely as an area of crucial interest at a time when our country is completing the first decade of initiation of the New Economic Policy since 1991 based on the LPG (Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation) strategies of Economic Reforms. As this marked a near U-turn in Indian economic policies in almost all sectors of the economy including labour, far reaching changes are taking place in every comer of the country during the last decade. Gradual withdrawal of the state from its economic activities following the dictum that the state has no business in business with consequent shrinkage of the public sector, introduction of exit policy for labour. downsizing of firms by shedding of surplus labour, substitution of tenure job with part-time and casual works, introduction of partial globalisation where cross country mobility of labour is forbidden and similar other sea-changes introduced in the labour front have generated concern not only for the national and global trade union movement and labourers in general, but also for the policy matters in the government and corporate sector. This has resulted widespread aca-demic curiosity and debate about the changing situation of the Indian labour in the post-reform decade and the Department of Economics. Rabindra Bharati University decided to organise a two-day national seminar on this very important and vital theme. Among the large number of research papers presented in the seminar by experts, this edited volume contains as many as twenty-two articles and considering the variety of the subject dealt in these papers, they have been grouped under five broad parts. These are: 1) Indian Labour in the Post-Liberalisation Period Theoretical and General Issues, (2) Infor-mal Sector and Child Labour in India, (3) Structural Reforms and Industrial Relations in India, (4) Agricultural Labour in India after Liberalisation and (5) Industrial Labour in India in the Post-Reform period. Following is a brief introduction of the papers distributed
among these five sections of the volume There are altogether five papers (Mathur, Deshpande, Mukherji, Chatterjee and Bhaumik) included in Part 1. Ashok Mathur has chosen quality of employment in India in the context of liberalisation for discussion as it is one of the major gaps of employment policy. He attempts to discuss in his paper the impact of the policy of liberalisation on the various dimensions of the quality of employment viz magnitude of non-employment, work environment, wages/salaries of workers, stability of employment and type of work, educational level of labour force and equity in access to employment opportunities.
The paper also attempts to examine regional variations in the quality of employment existing among the major states of India. It has been observed that while there has been a decline in non-employment and a higher educational attainment of the work force, the organised sector employment in the secondary sector could not keep pace with growth of income and the share of casual labour is increasing. The issues of labour flexibility with job security and regional variations in the dimensions of employment quality are also discussed in this exhaustive and extremely informative article. Lalit Deshpande has discussed the short run impact of liberalisation on labour in terms of participation rates, unemployment and underemployment, employment status, sectoral distribution of workers, casualisation and feminization. There has been increased demand for labour in the urban areas while WPR of rural women declined. Smriti Mukherjee's paper discussed the reforms in external sector and its linkage with the functioning of domestic labour market with the help of a simple model. Both trade liberalisation and capital account liberalisation are discussed in the context of the trade reforms and their impact on the labour market. Biswajit Chatterjee in his paper has argued for a new direction in state policy to introduce the norm of efficiency wage in different sectors of the economy when the integration with the global markets has become an irreversible process. Such an approach may also help the process of poverty alleviation. Of course such a strategy will involve institutional reforms which may be difficult to achieve.
Alok K. Bhaumik has dwelt upon the conceptual and empirical is-sues of worker's industrial cooperatives in the perspective of the so called 'workers' sector. On the basis of a survey of workers' cooperatives, the author concludes that with certain concrete steps, a large number of viable small units in West Bengal can be salvaged as under the ever widening and deepening impacts of economic liberalisation, the casual efforts of private workmen cannot make any meaningful headway to revolutionise the conditions of production and to arrest the growth of monopoly in geometrical progression.
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