The politics of dispossession in an Odishan steel town

Abstract

The article discusses how industrial workers in Rourkela, a steel town in Odisha, experience the large-scale job losses entailed by the recent restructuring of India’s first public sector steel plant. In this article, I argue that this manpower reduction presents a moment of what Harvey (2003) calls accumulation by dispossession and which he considers as the hallmark of neoliberal capitalism. Importantly, I add to Harvey’s analysis that this process is experienced, and acted upon, in significantly different ways by different fractions of the town’s steel workforce. Taking a long-term historical perspective, I will show that these differences are rooted in the politics that the postcolonial regional state of Odisha has pursued in the town since the 1950s. In methodological terms, the argument put forward in this article follows Burawoy’s (2000) call for an ethnographic ‘grounding’ of global processes such as neoliberalisation that pays attention to how such processes shape and are shaped by local histories of dispossession and resistance against it.

So-called Accumulation by Dispossession

“…Whether privatization might have led to an increase in profits does not change the argument, since they spring from surplus-labor, having nothing to do with ownership. Something similar can be learned from internal distinctions identified by Strümpell (2014) in the restructuring of India's public sector steel industry during the last two decades. In western Odisha, the installation of mines and mills dispossessed thousands of tribal people from their lands.…”

Autonomy to Perpetual Dependence: Changing Occupational Patterns of Adivasis in India

“…About half of the top mineral-producing districts of these states are adivasi-dominated districts which signify a large-scale loss of livelihood and displacement of adivasis (Bhushan et al, 2008; Ministry of Tribal Affairs, 2014). No doubt, mining and industrialisation generated ample employment opportunities, however, they became ghettoised in the employment process due to lack of social capital and politics of identity (Haldar & Abraham, 2015; Kujur, 2017; Strümpell, 2014). For instance, in the collieries and Bharat Coking Coal Ltd (BCCL) in the district of Dhanbad, Jharkhand, and Rourkela Steel Plant in the state of Odisha, the contractors and managers who were overwhelmingly non-adivasi migrants persistently skewed the recruitment in favour of their own countrymen, that is, persons sharing the same culture and connected by their kinship or caste (Heuzé, 1996; Kela, 2012; Parry & Strümpell, 2008).…”

Unpicking Precarity: Informal Work in Eastern India's Coal Mining Tracts

“…Up until the 1980s, collieries relied mostly on manual labour, but since then increased mechanization and the expansion of opencast mining methods have significantly reduced labour intensity (Lahiri-Dutt, 2014b). This has been compounded, since economic liberalization in the early 1990s, by continuous downsizing and casualization of the permanent workforce for the purpose of economic efficiency, which has been a feature of public-sector enterprises specifically (Parry, 2013(Parry, , 2014Strümpell, 2014).…”