The emergence of small tea growers is a relatively new phenomenon in Assam. Owners of small land plots mainly located in the eastern part of the state have taken to small tea cultivation in a big way in the last three–four decades. The nature of production of the sector is informal. The unemployed youth and farmers of other unprofitable crops, who have taken to small-scale tea cultivation, are likely to be exploited by agents and owners of tea factories who buy raw tea leaves. Primary survey data are collected from five districts of eastern and central Assam to investigate the monopsonistic exploitation of small tea growers by tea leaf buyers.
Why does the state fail to notice that a girl/woman entering prostitution, either through coercion or choice, is the same one who got married early, never went to school, or struggled in informal labour markets from an early age? From being consistently invisible in the pre-sex work phase of her life, what makes a sex worker so visible in the eyes of the state? What does this reveal of the state rather than the sex worker? The answers to these questions could help us think of sex workers’ lives beyond the narrow debates of trafficking versus sex work, making them part of more mainstream development concerns.
Delhi’s homeless migrants work daily wage jobs that provide temporary housing on worksites, but they often endure abuse from their contractors and employers and receive low to no wages. The city’s approximately 200 shelters allot 18 square feet per resident, which is far below the National Urban Livelihoods Mission’s Scheme of Shelters for Urban Homeless guideline of 50 square feet per person. Labourers in Yamuna Pushta use congested shelters because the nearby jobs determine their survival. In this context, the homeless labourers’ working and shelter conditions, the skills they possess, and the barriers they face to decent working conditions are examined.
Living with Oil & Coal: Resource Politics & Militarization in Northeast India by Dolly Kikon, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019; pp xiii + 189, price not indicated.
The intrinsic commitment of the accredited social health activists towards the well-being of the community is unduly exploited by the state in the name of “volunteerism.” It is high time a wholesome definition of work is adopted to understand the inconspicuous contributions made by these front-line healthcare workers, who form a key link in the public health system in India.
The recently passed Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2018 is woefully unaware of the present context of globalisation and the changing forms of labour dispossession and exploitation.
Primarily based on archival research, especially an unpublished diary of Nicobarese stalwart leader John Richardson, this article gives a glimpse of the sufferings that the Nicobarese endured under the Japanese colonial regime during World War II. The regime exposed the indigenes to war, slavery, torture, and executions. At the same time it engendered leadership in the Nicobar Islands which consolidated these historically isolated people into a community and ended their prolonged economic and sexual exploitation.
Social Power and Everyday Class Relations: Agrarian Transformation in North Bihar by Anand Chakravarti; Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2001; pp 311, Rs 525.
