Marx is Dead. Long Live Surplus Value of Workers.
Ideals of the proletariat, their commune and a proletariat dictatorship lay fossilised as painful photos of scores of migrant labourers walking many hundred miles to reach the safety of their village hit headlines in India in the early days of the first wave of Covid-19 in 2020. An indifferent bourgeoisie sat in the comforts of their home debating the timing of the national lockdown, letting out an occasional sigh for the unfortunate workers, while the migrant labourers walked across the country, fleeing not from a killer virus but something far deadlier than that: state apathy. These workers, mostly from the hinterlands of eastern and central India migrate in hordes every day from their villages to the western or southern states in search of a better life. In the quest for prosperity beyond the confines of their impoverished homes, the migrant worker is hurled into the hostility of an unfamiliar terrain, the guest states never treat him as their own. His labour is exploited to drive higher growth, but he is never co-opted as an equal shareholder in the bounty of development. Governments are indifferent, economists reduce them to datasets in theories, artists look for Dickensian inspiration in the squalor of the workers’ lives and we simply look away.
In one corner lies shattered our early nation builders’ vision for India's destiny that aimed at achieving national integration through equitable growth. Nehru’s efforts to consolidate India's economy led to the implementation of the freight equalisation policy, which required eastern states to cede their natural resources in the interest of national development. Over the ensuing decades, coal and other minerals extracted from Bihar, Odisha and Bengal fuelled industrialisation in Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Maharashtra, catalysing mass migration of labourers from the eastern states to their industrialised counterparts.
As India celebrates its 75th Republic Day, its economic terrain reflects the profound disparity between the eastern region and the southern and western states. While the former functions as a primary supplier of labour and resources, the latter boasts the most favourable socio-economic indicators: fruits of industry-led growth and development. So, in India’s journey from the Nehruvian socialism to the present-day market-driven economy, if there is one clear winner, it is the clique of southern and western states, and, if there is one unfortunate loser, it is the group of eastern and central states.
In light of volumes of literature detailing India's poverty and successive governmental failures to address it over seven decades, scant attention has been paid to the structural framework that consigned the people of an entire Indian region to poverty. By and large, observers are at a loss of words about how and by whom the decisions to start greenfield and other industrial projects are taken, and if there is an economic philosophy at work here.
Outlook Business in this edition looks at this industrial apartheid and analyses the often-overlooked and deliberate design of India's centralised economic growth policy, which systematically concentrated industrial activity in certain regions to confer upon India an economic advantage both globally and domestically.
In the din around India’s growth story, unfortunately, the role of migrant labour workforce has not become part of the discourse on industrialisation or "just development" in the country. Instead, he is mostly reduced to a pawn in the hands of the opportunist politician in the insider-versus-outsider narrative.
No one spares a thought for the millions from eastern and central hinterland who continue their search for better wages as they slowly lose hope for similar opportunities in their home states. They silently yearn for an agitation around equitable growth. After all, everyone in a democracy deserves equal opportunities at development.
