This paper attempts to see how a particular labour market (domestic service), a traditionally male domain, became segregated both by gender and age in the post-partition Indian state of West Bengal, and mainly in its capital city Calcutta. It argues that the downward trend in industrial job opportunities in post independent West Bengal, accompanied by the large scale immigration of men, women and children from bordering East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), led to a general decline in wage rate for those in domestic service. Poor refugee women, in their frantic search for a means of survival, gradually drove out the males of the host population who were engaged in domestic service in urban West Bengal by offering to work for a very low wage and often for no wage at all. As poor males from the neighbouring states of Bihar, Orissa and the United Provinces constituted historically a substantial section of Calcutta domestic workers, it was mainly this group who were replaced by refugee women. The second stage in the changing profile of domestic service since the 1970s in urban West Bengal was arguably set by migrating girl children from different parts of the state to Calcutta city in search of employment. This is probably why West Bengal had the highest girl children's work-participation rate in urban India in 2001. * The authors are grateful to Bikash Chakravarty and N. Krishnaji, for their comments. The authors also wish to acknowledge their debt to the two anonymous referees of the journal.
West Bengal (WB) ranks high among the 15 major states of India, where there is still a disturbing persistence of underage marriage among girls, leading to early motherhood as a consequence. The article explores the reasons for this in the context of social and economic conditions in the state. The article argues that more than poverty and illiteracy, the unavailability of new employment opportunities for women and girls in the rural and urban areas of the state explains why parents do not have the incentive to invest in more schooling or the higher education of their daughters. The article is mainly based on secondary data with occasional references to some primary evidence from a recent survey done by the author.
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The last available census estimated around 10 per cent of total urban working women in India are concentrated in the low-paid domestic services such as cleaning, cooking and taking care of the children and the elderly. This is found to be much higher in certain parts of India, emerging as the single most important avenue for urban females, surpassing males in the service since the 1980s.By applying an imaginative and refreshing mix of disciplinary approaches ranging from economic models of the household, empirical analysis and literary conventions, this book analyses the changing labour economy in post-Partition West Bengal. It explains how and why women and girl children have replaced this traditionally male bias in the gender segregated domestic service industry since the late 1940s, and addresses the question of whether this increase in vulnerable individuals working in domestic service, the growth of the urban professional middle class in the post liberalization period, and the increasing incidences of reported abuses of domestics, in urban middleclass homes in the recent years, are related.Covering five decades of the history of gender and labour in India, this book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of gender and labour relations, development studies, economics, history, and women and gender studies.Deepita Chakravarty is Associate Professor and Chairperson at the Centre for Women's Studies,
Despite the pursuit of similar industrial policies during the post-1990s, Indian states have revealed divergent outcomes in industrial growth. Such divergence suggests different levels of policy implementation which itself is a result of the interplay of formal and informal institutions, historically shaped. We try to explain this divergence in the context of the evolution of state-business relations in West Bengal, a coastal state in Eastern India, and unique among Indian states not only by virtue of being ruled by a Leftist regime for an uninterrupted 34 years (1977( -May, 2011, but also by having witnessed a turnaround of sorts in the outlook of the former government towards private capital within this period. Our findings suggest that it is the peculiarity of institutional behaviour that determines the policy outcomes in the state. The rigidities in political as well as economic institutions in the state are prompting us to look at West Bengal as a classic case of 'institutional stickiness' leading to 'path dependency'.
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