Next-gen precarity: gender and informal labor in the Eastern Himalaya

Abstract

In the eastern Himalayan region of Sikkim and Darjeeling, India, young women migrate from within and outside the area to work in the expanding retail and service sector. This sector demands very little from them in terms of education, technical skills or financial literacy; the emphasis being on their youth, and supposed socio-cultural and gendered attributes of docility, flexibility and manageability. Simultaneously, technological and infrastructural advancements combined with the influx of cheap fakes of international brands have made borderlands prominent sites of low-end globalization. The informal sector thrives on the back of this rapidly expanding market, the unceasing supply of cheap, flexible and docile labor and the invisibility of laboring bodies and their inherent precarity. However, the informal sector and the attributes that it seeks also create room to maneuver, and negotiate precarity. Focusing on this newly formed but rapidly growing precariat in the eastern Himalayan borderland, and using qualitative data, this paper illustrates (a) how capitalism, through consumption, can create precarious lives and livelihoods (b) the emerging contradictions (empowerment, exploitation) in social and gendered relations as a result of informal employment and (c) the transformation of borderlands into new sites of low-end globalization.

Keywords:

• Gender
• informal labor
• precarity
• consumption
• Himalaya

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank all the respondents in Gangtok, Sikkim, and Dunchu Lepcha for feedback and comments.

Ethical approval

Ethical approval for the project was covered under the ethical approval for the RiSEZAsia project, as per the Aarhus University Research Ethics Committee Guideline.

I have since changed jobs and am now employed by the University of Western Australia.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The informal economy is comprised of all forms of “informal employment” i.e., employment without labor or social protection—both inside and outside formal enterprises, including both employment in small, unregistered enterprises, self-employment and wage employment in unprotected jobs (Chen, 2007). The informal sector also consists of economic units (for instance, small-scale businesses, retail, cottage industries) that produce goods and services legally, but engage in operations that are not registered or regulated by fiscal, labor, health and tax laws (Agarwala, 2008, p. 376).

2 Entrepreneurial Marwari traders from different parts of India migrated to Sikkim in the late nineteenth century, initially to trade in wool and later diversified into cardamom and other cash crops (Subba, 1988, p. 359; also see Viehbeck, 2017). Over time, industrious Marwari families were successful in establishing businesses in Sikkim and Darjeeling Himalaya.

3 Sikkimese citizenship is formulated along the Sikkim Subjects Regulation Act, 1961 and the Sikkim Subject Certificates that establishes the identity of the holder as a bonafide citizen of Sikkim. Only Sikkim Subject Certificate holders are legally eligible to own property in non-Municipality areas, work in the government sector, claim exemption from income tax and access other state benefits (see Eden, 2015).

4 Under these policies different types of industries–small, medium and large– receive various incentives/ subsidies for a 10-year period which include 100% excise duty exemption on finished products manufactured there, 100% exemption on income tax for the first 5 years, capital investment subsidy of 30% on the investment in plant and machinery, and reimbursement of 100% insurance premium.

5 The 2017–2018 to 2019–2020 Medium Fiscal Policy report states that “The State taxes of Sikkim have remained less buoyant due to the pattern of growth where the sectors growing rapidly and contributing to growth process have not contributed to tax revenues…Although, the manufacturing, power and construction sectors emerged as major driving force for the Sikkimese economy, its impact on State finances, particularly on revenue generation has not been very productive…” (Government of Sikkim, 2018, p. 5).

6 The pharmaceutical industry in Sikkim employs approximately around 20,000 people (Roy, 2020), of which women from Sikkim and neighboring areas make a fairly large percentage. Exact number of women employed by the pharmaceutical factories have not been collated by any local government agency.

7 In contrast, women working in casual roles in pharmaceutical factories require at least some basic level of educational qualifications and identity documentation, and are legally recognized as “labour” with rights and benefits (see Chettri, 2020).

8 Salaries were negotiated individually, some were calculated on a daily rate, some monthly. The average monthly salary was INR 6000–7000/ USD 80–90; daily salaries were calculated at INR 350/ USD 5 per day.

Additional information

Funding

Fieldwork for this paper was funded by the Aarhus University Research Foundation as a part of the RiSEZAsia project.

Notes on contributors

Mona Chettri

Dr. Mona Chettri is an Australia-India Institute Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. She is the co-editor of Development Zones in Asian Borderlands (2021) and author of Constructing Democracy: Ethnicity and Democracy in the eastern Himalaya (2017), both published by Amsterdam University Press. She has published widely on urbanization, ethnicity, politics and development in the eastern Himalayan borderland. Her current research focuses on the intersections between gender, labor, urbanization and infrastructure in the Sikkim-Darjeeling Himalaya, India and regional Australia.