In-House Seminar on Self Exploitation in Indian Manufacturing: Observations from Large-Scale Sample Surveys in India
Soham Bhattacharya, Assistant Professor at the BASE University and a long time collaborator of the Foundation presented a seminar titled “Self Exploitation in Indian Manufacturing: Observations from Large-Scale Sample Surveys in India”.
The seminar was presented in a hybrid mode. Gaurav Bansal, Manikantha Nataraj, Nelson Mandela S and Ritam Dutta joined the seminar online whereas Aaliya Sehar, Arindam Das, Rakesh Mahato, Sai Chandan Kotu, Sethu C.A, Tapas Modak, Utkarsh and Yogesh Sharma joined from the Foundation’s office.
The seminar was based on a collaborative study which Soham did with Nelson Mandela S and S. Niyati.
The aim of their work was to provide a quantitative basis for the existing theorisations on self-exploitation. Soham began the presentation by providing some trends in self employment in the manufacturing sector based on the official secondary data sources. The presentation then provided the extent of ‘self-exploitation’ in the sector and proceeded to identify the concentration of these self exploited workers across genders and sub-sectors of manufacturing.
The presentation was followed by an engaging discussion with the attendees. Comments and clarifications suggested some new insights for the authors to probe.
The discussion was focused around the classifying the extent of self-exploitation across castes and regions.
Here are a few glimpses from the seminar…