RESEARCH
The research I have been doing, individually or jointly with my colleagues, over the last two and a half decades is on a few interrelated areas, all focusing on labour and economic development. Some of our major research projects are listed below.
The Employment Challenge: Demographic and Labour Market Changes in India.
In 2020, India accounted for a fifth of the worldwide population of 15 to 29-year-olds. This young population could be a fulcrum for future economic growth within the country and globally. At the same time, creating jobs for new entrants to the labour market will be a growingly critical policy challenge.
Industrialisation and Political Economy
The relatively small size of Indian manufacturing, especially with respect to employment, has been an important development challenge. This is despite the fact that India’s plan-led industrialisation inaugurated in 1950 was one of the most ambitious in the developing world. In mainstream discussions, the problems of Indian industry are often attributed to government interventions in the early decades and the alleged absence of ‘flexibility’ in the labour market. Our research contradicts this view. We argue that India’s industrial growth is held back due to the skewness in the country’s demand structure (arising, in turn, from unequal income distribution), slow growth of investment that led to demand and supply constraints, strategies of Indian businesses that tend to derive competitiveness from cheap wages rather than innovation, limited support for small entrepreneurs, and the absence of a coherent industrial policy since the 1990s.
Migration and Inequalities
Millions of Indians migrate from rural areas to distant urban locations to earn precarious livelihoods in low-wage jobs. Our field research shows that socio-economic disadvantages faced by the workers – on account of landlessness, caste-ridden social structures, and lack of employment opportunities – ‘push’ workers out of their villages. At the same time, in the long run, migration leads to improved wages and incomes in rural areas where workers migrate in large numbers. During 2022-23, my colleagues and I surveyed close to 500 migrant workers at their places of work, including Ludhiana (in Punjab), Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu), and Kozhikode and Kochi (in Kerala). In 2024, we conducted further field studies in rural areas, which are some of the major sources of migrant labour, including Gopalganj (Bihar) and Ganjam (Odisha).
Labour Economy Development 