manufacturing

One major driver behind India’s decision to embrace the “eastern” regional trade agreements during 2010–11 and graduate from the “Look East Policy” (1991) to the “Act East Policy” (2014) has been the urge to integrate the domestic manufacturing sector with “Factory Asia.” The article analyses India’s trade pattern through an endogenous structural break analysis with monthly data for 10 major sectors, involving the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China, Japan, and South Korea separately. The analysis concludes that the recent stream of events in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic offers India an opportunity to consolidate the domestic manufacturing sector.

The growth of the manufacturing sector is important for employing a growing labour force and much is also dependent on their skill level. Enterprise surveys in six sample towns of Bihar, a state characterised by slow industrialisation and urbanisation, find evidence of fairly strong rural–urban linkages for manufacturing enterprises. Although the linkages indicate that the manufacturing sector has the maximum potential to create employment by absorbing the surplus labour in the rural areas, it was found that this sector has been languishing in the sample towns. The findings also flag the challenges and areas of growth for industries.

Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn and the Lives of China’s Workers by Jenny Chan, Mark Selden and Pun Ngai, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020; pp xvi + 277, $19.95.

Migrant workers in one of Mumbai’s most industrially dense areas with 3,500 small manufacturing and recycling units face a number of hazards, with fires being among the common ones. This article looks closely at the causes and aftermaths of these fires and notes how the workers cope with them even as their skills and knowledge prevent even bigger accidents.

The closure of Nokia's mobile phone assembly plant in Sriperumbudur, near Chennai, just eight years after it commenced production, illustrates how corporations can quit operations at a point when it is no longer profitable for them to continue, while the impact of such closures on workers is profound. The special economic zones policy of the state actively promoted corporate-led industrialisation promising employment, and creating aspirations among young workers. There was no accountability or labour-centred exit policies factored into the state's industrial policies when state governments welcomed private investments. With the closure of Nokia, not only have promises been broken, but its workers and supply companies have lost their livelihoods and future possibilities of work.