Caring for destitution or not? – Jan Breman

Prof. Jan Breman delivered the T.G. Narayanan Memorial Lecture 2013, at the Triple Helix Auditorium, Central Leather Research Institute, Chennai on 18 January 2013.

Through his vast field experience in Gujarat, he explains that the rosy picture of growth and ‘vibrant Gujarat’ isn’t in fact so. He further said that for any development to be ‘inclusive’, the process must be participatory and it is the state that must reach out to its citizens, especially to those who don’t have the agency to avail the various social security provisions that they are legally entitled to.

Audio recording of the lecture is available here…

The following is the text of the lecture.

The moral standard of state and society can be deduced from the way people are treated who are not productive anymore and have no assets of their own. Missing the means for sell-providence includes all those among the labouring poor who are disabled either because of Old age, defective health or other handicaps that prevent them for working for their livelihood. With the introduction of the Informal Workers’ Security Act the Government of India seemed to acknowledge that people without means of livelihood were entitled to state provisions if they had lost their labour power to gain an income. However, the act passed by the end of 2008 was not the beginning of a right-bascd approach to solve the problem of improvidence. It merely enabled states to incorporate various schemes and programmes which were already in place in different parts of the country for vulnerable categories in a nation-wide framework and back them up with central funding.

What were the arrangements made in the past for providing sustenance to the labouring poor when they lost the capability to work? My presentation will focus on West India where I have carried out fieldwork in both rural and urban localities during the past half century. From the pre-colonial era onwards members of the tribal Halpati caste in south Gujarat used to be attached as farm servants to the main landowners of higher castes. Engaged in a condition of bondage they had a right to livelihood and received social benefits in exchange for serving their patrons dutifully and loyally in a relationship of life time duration which was passed on from generation to generation. In addition to their daily wages paid in kind, the labouring poor were entitled to their basic needs in the slack season or when they were not fit to work due to illness or old age. The terms of engagement extended to provisions which enabled the halis to take care of life cycle events and other social obligations. Thus, patronage and exploitation were the opposite ends of an arrangement which allowed for the cost of social reproduction at the bottom of the agrarian economy and facilitated a culture of domination imposed by the high-caste landowners in the peasant society that was India. Labour bondage, of course, also implied that people without access to land had to relinquish their freedom and to accept subordination in order to be secured of their livelihood. Once agricultural production became more capitalist in nature, and not labour hut land became a scarce commodity, a process of depatronization started which left the former clients in a condition of isolation. The landowners did not feel obliged any longer’ to guarantee the livelihood of their subordinates. The government turned out to be reluctant to take over the functions of patronage, especially the provision of protection and security. The landless class was excluded from the land reform operation that was carried out shortly after independence and had no other option but to continue working for wages that were barely enough to survive. Thus, at the start of my village-based fieldwork in the early 1960s, I found the rural proletariat of south Gujarat in a state of pauperization. …Read on…

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