Prof Bhaskar explores economic marginalisation in India, focusing on urban marginalised men, slum dwellers, and the middle class, highlighting systemic factors, exclusively for Different Truths.
In general, the marginalisation of some people across countries is a fact that takes different types like social, cultural, economic, and political that are often overlapping. For the time being, let me delve into the discourse on economic marginalisation, keeping in mind that it may not be strictly separated from social-political marginalisation, particularly in the context of India.
The marginalisation that I am going to talk about does not include destitute and lunatic; it includes those who are consciously active and are dispossessed, disadvantaged, deprived, excluded, and adversely included in the system.
The system offers both private and public utilities for those who constitute the system, that is, human society. I exclude from this discourse the universal utilities like air, water, and sunlight that everyone is supposed to have equal access to. Though, of course, water may be polluted, safe drinking water may not be accessed, water may be commodified, and so on. I am not going into the discourse on how access to universal public utilities can be obstructed.
Thus, when I include public utilities, it means physical infrastructure like roads, bridges, flyovers, and railways; fuel as electricity, gas, and water as in oceans, rivers, canals, ponds, and wells. I have reasons to believe that people across caste, community, group, and gender have access to all of these. Pricing of these public utilities, of course, may exclude some or adversely include some.
People Excluded
Despite philosophies propagated by saints, benevolent people, and political-economic scholars that ‘Nation First’ and ‘People First’ or ‘Sabka Vikas’ or a shift from ‘Bahujan’ to ‘Sarvojan’, the system is stable with a large chunk of people excluded. But direct exclusion does not leave the scope for dispossession, and hence there remains less chance for the privileged to possess. Hence, the adverse inclusion of some is a mandatory condition for dispossession-possession.
Adverse inclusion is visible in rural India for its production character, which is in feudal mode, notwithstanding the ‘green revolution’ and associated technology. This is because land is the basic means of production that somehow accommodates workers as subsistence farmers, marginal farmers, tenants, and a few as wage-based agricultural labourers. In the urban economy of India, exclusion is less visible and adverse inclusion is visible, other than the economically declining middle section, which tries it’s best to conceal adverse inclusion.
Exclusion and Adverse Inclusion
Often exclusion and adverse inclusion are explained by the hypothesis of ‘low productivity’ that I reject for the time being. The visibility is manifest in the living and work-life of the slum dwellers, where the woman is often a wage-paid domestic worker and her husband a rickshaw puller or a mason on an ad hoc basis and so on. In gender division of labour, the wage rate of the woman remains low, and in the case of working as a domestic paid worker, she is forced to work in many houses in the towns and cities.
The major question is with the disguised marginal workers in urban India that I term ‘marginalman’. The middle section constitutes a component of it if one observes the labour composition of these households. Not essentially to get the minimum needs to live biologically, these households need, and often more, to spend on the education of children and health care of the elderly. Spending on’merit goods’ like education and health does not allow the urban low-pay salaried worker to rest at home to have a leisurely, superannuated life.
In many situations, the next generation is yet to be economically independent, get married, and be mobile in search of an appropriate job and hence the superannuated father or guardian continues to work for wages. But now he is a ‘marginal man’ for his previous medium-tenure or long-tenure on-the-job regular wage is lost. He is now at the mercy of the new employer, often in odd jobs like as a salesman in shops that sell medicines and clothes and provide other types of services in the urban areas. The anxious high-speed walking or moving on archaic bicycles of these hassled people on public roads at around 8:00 to 9:00 in the morning to avail local trains and buses to reach the work site on time will prove the point. Some of the households launched half-hearted home delivery systems of cooked food, the tenure of which remains uncertain about quality and the possibility of being crowded out.
The Urban Economy
Relative to the labour-hiding middle section of the urban economy, the chronically illiterate and less literate workers remain money-wise by sitting or standing roadside to sell vegetables and fruits. Those who feel hesitant to be vendors as such start moving on archaic two-wheelers to deliver goods to households collected from the hotels and restaurants employed by Amazon, Zomato, Flipkart, and all those. In acute survival crises, some become hawkers selling goods in trains-on-motion, as may be observed in the Howrah and Sealdah divisions of the Indian Railways.
So, who are the marginal men in urban India? One, they are newly marginalised as an offshoot of the market technology interface. Two, they are inter-generationally marginalised for perpetual poverty. Three, they are marginalised in gender division. The intergenerationally marginalised are relatively easy to observe by their dilapidated houses, by their standing on the Q in front of fair price shops, and all that. The newly marginalised are observed, if one has the patience to observe, in the local vegetable-fish bazaar at around noon who come late to buy at the expected cheapest prices of goods that save their budget for the day or month. Some more marginalized stand in front of the gates of temples to get food for the day, though the task is not easy because of the possibility of being crowded out.
Even after all these attempts with success and failure if marginalisation perpetuates, they relocate them to seek support from well-off households in a new location like some cash, some clothes etc.—they seek help to survive biologically but narrate their difficulties in getting daughter married, health care of dependents in family, etc.
Emergence of a Marginal Man
Marginalisation is not accidental. The breakdown of the joint family led to the emergence of a marginal man in the absence of multiple dependable hands in crises. Strike-lockout-closure of mills and factories led to marginalisation. The state of West Bengal may be taken as a notorious example of this agony. The alleged Covid-19 led to ‘Lockdown’ pan-India and consequential non-payment of wages to the workers who had to immediately leave the destination to come to the root, that is, for the workers who migrated earlier. Technological changes led to the obsolescence of labourers and their exit.
Summing up all the categories of these marginal men is impossible. They are not beggars, looters, or hooligans in political parties. Disguised marginal men in the middle section abstain from doing things that they understand as unethical. Marginalisation persists.
Can there be any positive steps to take care of the marginal man? The government of West Bengal provides Rs. 85,000 per cultural club for Durga Puja, which comes to be in crores when summed up. Business tycoons donate unaccounted money for all religious purposes. A little diversion of this money can do a lot to lift the marginal man. State willing, nothing is impossible.
Picture design by Anumita Roy
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