Relational Inequality and Economic Outcomes: A Consideration of the Indian Experience

ABSTRACT

The study of inequality by economists has largely focussed on distributive inequalities of various kinds. The focus on different dimensions of distributive inequality in access and outcomes is welcome. However, it is also important to consider relational inequalities and power imbalances, which economists typically consider to be the domain of sociology, anthropology and related disciplines. Many economic processes cannot be understood without analysing the underlying relational inequalities, which can reveal much about economic processes and associated policies. Some examples from the Indian experience, specifically relating to power imbalances created by gender and caste differentiation, indicate how this can play out. These are not simply ‘traditional social forms’ that are in opposition to or contradictory with capitalist accumulation. Rather, they are crucial in enabling segmented labour markets and enabling extractivist patterns of accumulation, on which recent Indian economic growth has been dependent.

KEYWORDS:

• Inequality
• labour market segmentation
• economic development

JEL CODES:

• J42
• J46
• J71
• O11
• O17
• Z13

1. Introduction: The Significance of Relational Inequality and Power Imbalances

In the social sciences, there is much greater concern with inequality, and economists — even mainstream economists — have been at the forefront of many discussions about inequality across different dimensions: assets, incomes, access to basic needs like food and shelter, access to basic services like health and education, employment opportunities, and the like. Distributive outcomes of particular economic policies and processes are now much-analysed, and the political forces behind such policies are increasingly evident and identified. The social characteristics of these economic inequalities are also the subject of much more research, with attributes beyond class, such as race, gender, ethnic origin, linguistic community, caste and other markers recognised as being critical.

Yet the opposite causation — from social inequality to economic outcomes — is perhaps less studied. More importantly, the two-way causation between social inequality on the one hand, and patterns of accumulation and the trajectory of development on the other, are not sufficiently recognised. In this essay, I examine how social inequalities determine specific forms and strategies of capitalist accumulation, and how economic institutions and policies play into this, with specific examples from the Indian experience.

This requires a shift away from distributive inequality, which has been the focus of economists. This considers the allocation across individuals or groups of either material goods or services, such as resources, primary goods, incomes; or non-material attributes, such as advantages, welfare, opportunities, or most broadly of all, capabilities (Sen 1980, Dworkin 1981; Cohen 2008; Pogge 2000). These are obviously essential to understanding the workings of economies and the implications of economic processes, and therefore it is not surprising that for several centuries now, economists have concentrated their attention on distribution. They have looked at shares of particular pies, often seen to be determined by luck or chance, such as the accident of birth into a particular class, location, ethnic group or gender. Aiming for greater equality in distribution has been described as ‘luck egalitarianism’ (Anderson 1999).

But there is another aspect of inequality: relational inequality. This is based on socially determined hierarchies, such as group inequalities that are systematically sustained by laws, norms or habits, generating groups of people who relate to one another as superiors or inferiors (Anderson 2012, and implicitly in Nussbaum 2003). Relational inequality implies a power imbalance, and therefore it can easily lead to distributive inequality as well. But its underlying principle is different: it is essentially about relative power and the dynamics associated with power, which shape human behaviour, social and economic processes and the corresponding outcomes.

As Anderson (1999, 288–9) puts it: ‘The proper negative aim of egalitarian justice is not to ensure that everyone gets what they morally deserve, but to create a community in which people stand in relation of equality to others.’ As a result, the idea of democratic equality ‘integrates principles of distribution with the expressive demand of equal respect.’ However, the idea of equal respect is not the only aspect of justice implied here: the point is that, since power relations are also critical in determining respect, freedom and therefore distribution as well, reduction of relational inequalities can be central to the egalitarian project.

Crucial to the concept of relational inequality is some explicit or implicit notion of hierarchy. Anderson (2012) identifies three broad types of such social hierarchy. First, those of domination or command, in which those occupying inferior positions are subject to the arbitrary unaccountable authority of social superiors, have to obey the commands of these superiors, and ask their permission to exercise various liberties. (Gender relations in many — in fact most — societies provide the most obvious example.) These may rely simply on cultural norms and social sanction, but they are often reinforced by legal systems. Second, hierarchies of esteem, in which those occupying inferior positions on the basis of some defined group identities are stigmatised and subjected to segregation, discrimination, persecution, or even violence. (These stigmatised identities can be based on, for example, race, sexual orientation, religion, language, customary dress, or ethnic or linguistic differences.) Third, hierarchies of standing, which reflect the power of those occupying superior social positions to get special weight and voice in social and public decisions and in the operation of social institutions. This enables the powerful to enjoy greater rights, privileges, opportunities or benefits than others in various dimensions, even as the social inferiors are marginalised and denied those rights, privileges, opportunities, or benefits.

Obviously, these various types of hierarchy can overlap, and when this happens it creates extreme forms of relational inequality, as is still evident in some expressions of the Indian caste system. This inevitably affects distributional inequalities as well, even if these are often perceived as sui generis or as the result of specific public policies.

Relational inequalities typically arise from and are sustained by notions of ‘tradition’ that can be cultural, religious or simply based on social norms that can have a long history. But they then interact with economic forces and market relations that are often seen to be independent, resulting not only in unequal power but multidimensional poverty and deprivation. This creates a complex dynamic between relational inequalities, distributional inequalities and patterns of accumulation. Relational inequalities, while being socially undesirable and ethically unjust in a broader sense, may actually be ‘useful’ for particular growth trajectories, which rely on them, and thereby accentuate and perpetuate them. Capitalism as a socio-economic system has been singularly effective in its octopus-like ability to absorb, integrate and utilise traditional social forms and institutions. As a consequence, capitalist accumulation processes and the different types of market relations that they enable and perpetuate tend to draw on aspects of tradition.

Arguably, this has been a key underlying factor in the Indian accumulation process. This interaction has not been given the attention it deserves in most analyses of India’s development (or lack of it). Specifically, I argue that social and relational inequalities have provided the basis for work distribution, labour segmentation and differential remuneration in both formal and informal labour markets. These help employers at all levels (ranging from large corporate business houses to small informal employers) to reduce production costs by enabling differential rates of exploitation of workers according to social category. They thereby become critical for underwriting certain patterns of accumulation and economic activity. They also enable the expansion of particular types of extractive industry that disproportionately displace traditional communities without political voice. As a result, India’s economic growth trajectory has actually been dependent upon the relational inequalities that superficially appear to exist in a separate social sphere.

This is significant not only because of the social and ethical implications of such inequalities. It also puts paid to the still-widespread notion of a ‘modernising’ capitalism. Far from destroying traditional forms of social oppression and discrimination as is often expected, in many ways Indian capitalist accumulation and the nature of the state’s engagement with it have resulted in a further strengthening of pre-existing social inequalities.

Some examples from the Indian experience show this clearly, as I have argued elsewhere (Ghosh 2019). Gender-based inequalities have enabled massive reliance on unpaid care work and significantly underpaid employment of women despite rapidly increasing economic activity expressed in GDP terms. Persistent caste discrimination has had a persistent and pervasive effect on occupational segmentation and prolonged the use of dehumanising forms of work such as manual scavenging and unprotected sanitation work. The voicelessness of some ethnic groups (such as ‘Scheduled Tribes’) has led to aggressive and systematic denial of their human rights, which has been a major enabler of the mineral-based extractive industries that were important factors in India’s economic ‘boom’ of the 2000s. Simply put, Indian economic growth cannot be understood without recognising the significant role of these relational inequalities, as patterns of accumulation and market functioning have relied on, and therefore further deepened and perpetuated, these very inequalities.

2. The Role of Gender Discrimination in Indian Economic Growth

Gender inequality is in some sense unique among forms of relational inequality, because it is inevitably cross-cutting and intertwined with all other forms of inequality. Biological differences have been used to explain at least some part of the crucial role that gender has played in determining the division of labour through history and in all societies. Since women bear children, while men do not, this has been the premise that has determined a much wider social division of labour. As a result, women have typically been made responsible for other aspects of social reproduction, even for activities that do not necessarily require women to undertake them. This is why women in almost all societies generally perform the bulk of childcare, the domestic work required for human functioning (like cooking, cleaning, ensuring other necessary goods and services) and the care of the sick, the elderly, the disabled.

This ‘social construction of gender’ exists in all societies, but to different degrees and expressed in different ways. Traditionally, the idea of the family is the means through which this has been most clearly expressed. Gender then determines a fundamental distribution of labour that in turn affects everything else in both economy and society. It determines how much power and autonomy women have relative to men in various decision-making, whether they get access to money incomes, whether they are able to own and control wealth or assets. It even determines the extent to which they get their basic needs and are allowed to develop their capabilities, how much education they get, how much they themselves get to be cared for. It determines whether and how women can function in society and with equal rights as citizens. All this means that gender provides a format for labour markets that can be easily segmented for the capitalist accumulation process to maximise value extraction from labour.

The Indian experience provides a stark example of this. Among the many paradoxes of recent economic growth in India, the persistence of widespread informality in economic activities and in employment is especially striking. Despite rapid GDP growth in India from the 1980s, there was little noticeable expansion of decent work opportunities for India’s relatively young labour force, nor of more formal employment. The (already low) employment elasticity of output growth declined, even as the economy was more exposed to global competition that was supposed to have favoured more labour-intensive activities. Aggregate employment even declined between 2011–12 and 2017–18 (Mehrotra and Parida 2021) and further deteriorated over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath (Ghosh 2022). Economic growth did not generate employment diversification, as most workers (especially women workers) remain stuck in low value added but arduous work in agriculture and low-grade services. The share of manufacturing in both output and employment has remained low, and low productivity work continues to dominate. Even within sectors, there are extremely wide variations in productivity across enterprises. Over several decades of rapid income growth, the expected formalisation of work and the concentration of workers into large scale production units did not occur. Rather, there was widespread persistence of informal employment and increasing self-employment even in non-agricultural activities. Notably, the period of rapid GDP growth was marked by low and declining work force participation rates of women, in a pattern unlike almost any other growing economy in any phase of history over the past two centuries.

Gender-based differences in labour markets and the social attitudes to women’s paid and unpaid work are also reflections of this broader tendency (Ghosh 2009; Mukherjee 2012). Most socio-economic indicators point to the low status of women in Indian society. The widespread perception that women’s work forms an ‘addition’ to household income, and therefore commands a much lower reservation wage, is common to both private and public employers, as well as to most workers. Women workers typically receive significantly lower wages even for similar work. In public employment, the use of underpaid ‘voluntary’ women workers receiving well below minimum wages has become institutionalised. They are essential to several major government programmes to deliver essential public services of health, nutrition, support for early child development and even education. Further, the role played by the unpaid labour of women in contributing not only to social reproduction but also to what would be recognised as productive economic activities in most other societies has been absolutely crucial in enabling this particular accumulation process.

Even more remarkably for an economy in which GDP has apparently been growing relatively rapidly, there has been a significant decline in women’s recognised employment. The work participation rate of rural women aged 15+ years declined from 35 per cent in 1999–2000 to 24 per cent in 2011–12 to less than 18 per cent in 2017–18, while the rate for urban women did not change from the very low rate of around 16 per cent. During the Covid-19 pandemic, there was further decline in women’s employment rates to drastically low levels, as overall employment was negatively affected (Ghosh 2022) Various explanations have been offered for this. For example, more young women are engaged in education; however, this is still not enough to explain the decline. Others have argued that rising real wages have allowed women in poor households to avoid or reduce involvement in very physically arduous and demanding work with relatively low wages.¹ So women especially in poorer families choose not to engage in difficult but low-paid employment outside the home when their family’s economic conditions allow it.

But these numbers relate to recognised employment, even if it is informal or self-employment. The same labour force surveys also include some categories that are described as ‘not in the labour force’. These include women engaged in different forms of economic activity that are unpaid, such as domestic care work (incorporating all social reproduction activities) and other activities such as the collection of firewood, cattle feed, water and foraged food, as well as sewing, weaving, and other tasks designed only for household consumption. Across income categories, the various activities associated with the ‘care economy’: care of the young, the old, the sick and the differently abled; cooking, cleaning and generally looking after healthy adults, continue to be perceived by both men and women as dominantly the responsibility of women in the household. When these services are outsourced and provided for monetary remuneration, the providers are recognised to be ‘workers’ in India; but when they are performed by women within households, such women are classified as ‘not in the labour force’.

If such work, which contributes to the economy, is recognised, a very different picture emerges. It then becomes clear that, far from very low work participation, actually more women work in India than men — it’s just that most of them work in unpaid activities.² Time use surveys conducted in 2017–18 confirm this tendency. The decline in women’s employment rates really reflects a shift from paid to unpaid work that is performed by the bulk of women in India.

The shift in the number of women in India engaged in recognised/paid work to those doing unpaid work was most marked for poor women — those in the bottom 40 per cent of households according to consumption expenditure. A significant share of such unpaid women workers (nearly half in rural areas and more than one-fifth in urban areas in 2011–12) were dominantly involved in fetching water for household consumption, an activity that also required more time than before.³ Another major activity was the collection of biofuels for cooking as they did not have access to or could not afford other fuel. Therefore, the absence of basic amenities was an important factor driving the increase in unpaid work. Nearly two-thirds of unpaid women workers reported that they had to perform these necessary tasks because there was no one else in the household to do them.⁴ The survey found that nearly half of women respondents were unable to participate in the labour market because of childcare and other domestic work, whereas only 1.5 per cent of men reported such a constraint. It has been noted that the nature of the survey questionnaire and the specific questions asked tend to result in undercounting of women’s work, even in what would be described as ‘economic’ activity (Abraham et al. 2023).

This lack of recognition of a significant part of the work dominantly provided by women has several important economic and social implications. The unpaid-paid continuum of women’s work serves to devalue both women and the work they do. Thus, when women do enter labour markets, their wages tend to be lower than those of men — not only because they are willing to work for lower wages, but because so much of their work is available for free. India has one of the largest gender gaps in wages to be found anywhere in the world, with women’s wages on average only around two-thirds that of men’s wages. Related to this, the occupations in which women dominate tend to be lower paid — and the wage penalty extends even to men doing similar work, such as in the low paid care sector. This is certainly true of private employers. But in India, even the government has used these gender-segmented labour markets to provide public services on the cheap, through various schemes. The largest such categories are anganwadi (maternal and childcare creche) workers in the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), and ‘accredited social health activists’ (ASHAs) in the National Health Mission. Instead of being treated as regular workers in public employment, they are described as ‘volunteers’ and are paid only a fraction of the official minimum wages. Similarly, women are disproportionately employed by state governments as para-teachers and auxiliary nurses and midwives, and paid far less than regular employees. Some scheme workers do not get any regular payments at all, but are remunerated through piece-rate or task-rate wages that provide extremely low incomes, even when their multiple responsibilities require full-time work (Sinha, Gupta, and Shriyan 2021). India may be one of the few countries that attempts to provide essential public services through such very underpaid women workers.

With respect to the broader link with accumulation strategies, what is important is that all this unpaid work provides a huge subsidy to the recognised economy and to the ‘formal sector’, which rely both directly and indirectly on the goods and services produced by these unsung and unrewarded or very poorly paid workers. Essentially, economic growth in India has relied hugely on the unrecognised and unremunerated contributions of women. Because this contribution is not recognised, it creates misleading perceptions of rising labour productivity in the economy, which ignore the role of unpaid workers. Also, public policy continues to ignore the need to reduce and redistribute such unpaid labour, persisting in the mistaken belief that GDP growth will simply generate enough ‘good jobs’ for everyone.

3. The Economic Implications of Caste Exploitation

The interplay of private accumulation and public policy is crucially determined by its location in certain social structures. Another major example is that of the hierarchies, discrimination and exploitation embedded in the Indian caste system, which has shown remarkable resilience and longevity despite economic ‘modernisation’. The persistence of such practices and their economic impact even during the period of the Indian economy’s much-vaunted dynamic growth has been noted (Human Rights Watch 2007). Nevertheless, this is inadequately recognised in most mainstream discussions of the Indian economy and development policy. This may be because ‘the modern market economy is a field in which the pervasive effects of caste are rendered invisible in ways that may serve selected interests by concealing processes of advantage and discrimination’ (Mosse 2020, 1228).

Like gender, caste practices have allowed segmented labour markets to persist and even intensify. Social categories tend to be strongly correlated with the incidence of poverty, and both occupation and wages differ dramatically across social categories (Amit Thorat 2010; Deshpande 2011). The probability of being in a low wage occupation is significantly higher for Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled Castes (Dalits), Muslims and Other Backward Castes (in that order) compared to the upper caste Hindu population. This is only partly because of differences in education and level of skill. But these differences in ‘skill’, insofar as they are important, also reflect the differential provision of education across these social categories which is also an effect of discrimination.

Caste practices that impact on physical mobility, access to infrastructure and credit, and ability to engage in certain occupations continue to operate to reduce the access of the lower castes to local resources as well as to income earning opportunities. This creates heavily segmented labour markets in both rural and urban areas, which force lower caste workers to provide their labour at lower rates to employers, often in harsh and usually precarious conditions (Shah et al. 2006; Thorat et al. 2009). Lack of assets and reduced access to credit inhibit possibilities of self-employment and micro-enterprise engagement. In addition, many social practices (such as restrictions on type of business and economic activity) effectively restrict the options open to lower caste and Dalit groups, as well as (increasingly) to certain religious groups like Muslims. It is notable that certain occupations that are both difficult and potentially hazardous, such as leather tanning and sanitation activity carried out without safety equipment, tend to be almost exclusively performed by such workers. These constraints can then be used to keep wages of such workers low, even in period of otherwise rising wages. Urban labour markets, even in supposedly ‘modern’ sectors and in large corporate enterprises, also provide extensive evidence of caste-based discrimination, occupational segmentation and wage gaps (Mondal 2019; Thorat 2021).

The impact of continued caste discrimination finds possibly its most stark expression in the persistence of the inhuman and supposedly unlawful practice of manual scavenging. This is defined as ‘the removal of human excrement from public streets and dry latrines, cleaning sceptic tanks, gutters and sewers’. This practice is still widely prevalent in India, driven not only by class and income divides, but much more by caste and patriarchy. All manual scavengers in the country, regardless of region, tend to come from the lowest and most oppressed castes. And then within such work, there is a further divide according to gender, with women workers even more discriminated against and exploited than men. Men who work in sanitation, even for public employers, tend to be engaged in cleaning septic tanks, gutters and sewers. Meanwhile women workers dominate in the cleaning of toilets or defaecation spaces, as well as the physical removal and carrying of faeces from toilets (Jahnavi Sen 2018). This last type of work performed by women of the lowest castes is extremely unpleasant but tends to be the lowest paid, with extremely low wage rates and sometimes only payment in kind in some minimal food items.

Both types of tasks are very unhealthy, and even carry severe risks to life, making sanitation work one of the most perilous occupations in India. Even open defecation in India is not always the result of poverty, including in rural areas, but a direct consequence of the caste system, untouchability and ritual purity (Coffey and Spears 2017). Ironically, the implementation of the current central government’s flagship ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’ (roughly translated as ‘Pure India Mission’) also implicitly relies on this form of caste-based labour exploitation. The focus has been on building toilets, without adequate attention to the required plumbing, water flows and removal of the deposits. In consequence, the ‘traditional’ practice of relying on workers from certain castes to ensure the physical removal of faeces remains entrenched and, according to some reports, may even have increased.

It is not only private and informal employers who rely on and thereby perpetuate manual scavenging. Public agencies, such as those involved in transport and in running municipalities, are also complicit. The Indian Railways is estimated to be the largest employer of manual scavengers (described as ‘sweepers’). Most trains in the railway system still rely on open toilets that dump faeces onto railway tracks, requiring manual removal. This is done by workers employed through private contractors, who are paid very little. They are only rarely provided with basic items such as gloves to wear, with little else in the way of protection or safety gear. Meanwhile, funds for ‘rehabilitation’ of manual scavengers have been low in provision and even less utilised — which is easy to understand when the government denies their existence in the first place. Typically, therefore, workers who cannot get other employment because of caste discrimination in what is already a stagnant labour market, are forced to go back to such work. Once again, therefore, the most regressive and oppressive socio-cultural tendencies of the past are effectively strengthened by a form of capitalism that is not ‘modernising’ so much as relying on traditional forms of relational inequality.

This is an extreme form of a much broader tendency of utilising caste differences to ensure greater exploitation of workers through segmented labour markets. It is worth noting that these tendencies have not been undermined by the several decades of relatively rapid ‘market-oriented’ growth in economic activity under a neoliberal economic policy regime.

4. The Exploitation of Nature and of Marginalised Tribal Communities

The complex nexus between politics and different levels of local, regional and national businesses has allowed for the appropriation of land and other natural resources that has been an integral part of the accumulation story and fed into the way that central and state governments have aided the process of private surplus extraction. More overt economic policies such as patterns of public spending and taxation are only one part of this — a substantial part relates to laws, regulations and their implementation (or lack of it) that provide the contours for the expansion of private capital.

The laws and regulations have been able to operate in particular ways because of the voicelessness of certain groups, particularly indigenous populations living in natural resource rich parts of the country (whether forests or mineral resources) and their powerlessness to respond to ‘development-induced displacement’. In addition to making labour cheap, forms of relational social inequality allow for making nature cheap, by dispossessing those who have traditionally lived on certain lands and relied on the local fruits of nature for their survival, so as to encourage extractive industries, dam-building and other types of ‘development’.

In 2000, it was estimated that as many as 50 million people had been displaced by such public and private projects over the previous half century (Ray 2000). Development-induced displacement accounts for the majority of internally displaced persons (IDP) in India. It is now widely recognised that various development projects like mega-dams create massive costs for local people who do not benefit at all from them. The larger and more centralised the project, the greater the bias in favour of large landholders, rich farmers, engineers, bureaucrats and politicians (Mohanty 2005). Tribal people occupying lands that are less urbanised and without pre-existing infrastructure have been disproportionately affected by this, reflecting also their lack of access to political power. It has been estimated that tribals constitute 35–30 per cent of the displaced population (Negi and Ganguli 2011).

When local people — especially tribals — do resist expropriation, they are likely to be presented as extremists. Sundar (2016) has shown that what effectively became a civil war in Bastar in central India was really about the ensuring the ability of private and state capital to extract the mineral resources of the region without due compensation or respect for local rights. The ‘anti-insurgency’ strategy of the Indian state against Maoists was not so much driven by fears of revolution, as it was to suppress the Maoist-supported protests of local people against land acquisition and the exploitation of minerals in the region.

5. By Way of Conclusion

The features of the Indian economic landscape described above have been crucial in generating the recent phase of rapid growth, even as they have allowed the persistence of backwardness and accentuated inequalities in the course of that expansion. The focus of the Indian state (and of most state governments at the regional level) has been on generating economic growth through various incentives to private capital.

New forms of capital can and do emerge and proliferate as a result of this strategy, but they do so in a wider context in which capitalist accumulation is based essentially on extraction and exploitation of social differences. The context is such that transactions in land, labour and product markets are not simply voluntary exchanges between equivalent parties. Instead, the game is played with dice that are heavily loaded in favour of capital, especially large capital, through various means. This operates through the appropriation of land, forests and other natural resources; through differentiated surplus extraction from workers in segmented labour markets; and by way of unbalanced markets in which peasant cultivators and small producers of goods and services have less power. Social institutions allow for discriminatory labour market practices. Legal and regulatory institutions are mobilised to enhance the bargaining power of capital. Political forces and administrative agencies actively engage in supporting these tendencies, for example through providing substantial overt and covert fiscal transfers, changes in land use modalities, and the like. These are in turn associated with various other more ‘purely economic’ patterns that pile on the imbalances: financial institutions, input and product markets that do not provide reasonable credit access, and so on.

Harriss-White (2005) argues that the greater part of the modern Indian economy is implicitly regulated or determined by social institutions derived from ‘primordial identity’ such as gender, caste and community. These interact with political forces, generating forms of patronage, control and clientelism that vary across regions. This makes the outcomes of government strategies, including those connected with liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation, different from those generally expected. Existing practices, such as gender discrimination in property ownership and control, have often been reinforced by corporate behaviour. These obviously add to the weight of socially discriminatory practices — and they affect how business houses at large and medium levels deal with more purely economic forces, and their attitudes to investment, employment and output.

All this can very quickly become prey to corruption and crony capitalism, and the Indian economy has no shortage of either. But there is a further, even more concerning tendency. This strategy generates perverse incentives for private players to benefit from relational inequalities, effectively militating against more broad-based and egalitarian economic expansion. This has reduced the incentives to focus on productivity growth and innovation as routes to more rapid growth, since state-aided primitive accumulation and socially determined extra-economic relationships provide easier and more reliable means of generating private surpluses. All this has actually been reinforced under globalisation, rather than being diminished by external competition.

Indeed, such practices have become the base on which the economic accumulation process rests. In other words, capitalism in India, especially in its most recent globally integrated variant, has used past and current modes of social discrimination and exclusion to its own benefit, to facilitate the extraction of surplus and ensure greater flexibility and bargaining to employers when dealing with workers. This then delivers an economic growth trajectory that is very different from the ‘Kuznets-Clark’ type, which ideally involved moving from primary to secondary and then tertiary sector activities, with more women entering paid employment and higher proportions of workers in formal employment over time. The deviation from this ideal type, which has been only rarely achieved in history, is very far from the Indian experience.

This suggests that social categories are not ‘independent’ of the accumulation process — rather, they allow for more surplus extraction, because they reinforce low employment generating (and therefore persistently low wage) growth. This creates incentives for absolute surplus value extraction on the basis of suppressing wages of some workers, rather than requiring a focus on relative surplus value extraction resulting from productivity increases. As a result, high productivity enclaves have not generated sufficient demand for additional workers to extend productivity improvements to other activities. Instead, the accumulation process even in ‘modern’ high productivity industries has relied indirectly on persistent low wages in supporting activities, or on unpaid labour, to underwrite the expansion of value added. This (possibly unique) pattern of Indian inequality underlies a growth process that generates further and continued inequality and does not deliver structural change.

This argument has specific resonance for the interaction between economists and anthropologists. It implies that economists have much to learn about social norms and patterns of behaviour that drive and determine particular relational inequalities. We need to look more closely into how these impact markets: how they are organised and operate; how non-market economies (such as the unpaid care economy) function; and how economic policies play out. In turn, the economic processes can reinforce, subvert or even contradict particular relational inequalities. This should be of interest to those who study societies and social and cultural relations. The scope for conversation — and the many advantages of such dialogue — appear to be infinite.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for involving me in a fruitful interaction between economists and anthropologists, and to Theresa Ghilarducci, Richard McGahey and Gustav Peebles for insightful comments on an earlier draft, as well as to Steven Pressman for his patience as an Editor.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Indeed, this is why it has been noted that much of women’s work participation in India is of the ‘distress’ variety, engaged in when the household is very poor or when there is a natural calamity, economic shock or other decline in household income (Himanshu 2011).

2 For example, in 2011-12, the total women’s work participation rate, including all of these activities, was as high as 86.2 per cent, compared to 79.8 per cent for men.

3 Another NSS survey in 2012 found that in rural areas, the average trip to the water source took 20 min, with an additional waiting time of 15 min at the water source, and that several trips were required in order to meet the water needs for household consumption. In urban areas the time for travel to the source was 15 min and the time spent waiting per trip was 16 min. Similarly, significant time was spent by women on collecting fuelwood and fodder for animals.

4 Despite this, a significant majority of such surveyed women said they would be willing to accept paid work, thereby showing the desperation to take on a double burden of work because of low family incomes.