Transit Labour – Proposal

The main aim of the proposed study would be to examine how “spacing” technologies are adapted to create New Town in Kolkata and how they impact on the interface between market rights and territorial rights. Studies on special economic zones in India, and the Indian state’s increasingly veering towards neo-liberal ways of running economy and society to re-organise governance of zones, is often marked by the ways of the market and capital, which determines the pattern of rule of law. Under these circumstances, Rajarhaat New Town, which houses one of the largest IT SEZ in Eastern India, IT Parks and residential townships by big real estate players in India, like DLF, Unitech, Ambuja Realty etc. provides an excellent instance of this new paradigm of development where the territorial limits of governance are determined by capital inflows. Rajarhaat or New Town in Kolkata, accessible by only one public transport route from the central part of the city of Kolkata, is an excellent example of how “spacing” technologies in terms of orienting workforce, mobility, accessibility, and architecture has led to a zone of exclusion through differential mapping of resources, access, and communication within one unit called the city.

The proposed study will examine the role of the virtual economy to map labour-in-transit; primarily through unstructured interviews and in-depth field work in Rajarhaat with the migrant construction workers, IT/ ITES workers, BPO workers and at the same time drivers of various transport agencies engaged in ferring drivers from home to workplace. The metamorphosis of the labour force in post- industrial townships like Rajarhaat shows the ways in which the virtual economy, the informational economy manages to erase the dirt and grime of primitive modes of accumulation; be it the methods of land acquisition, the resistance against such efforts of acquisition, land grab menace, crime and mismanagement of funds to allocate land, the strategies adopted to create New Town. A documentation of the labouring lives of the construction workers who come from various districts in West Bengal, the very nature of certain “laboring forms”, and the mobile nature of the work that marks the transit nature of the “labour” and spaces of work will show how this transition is shaped by primitive modes of accumulation where certain segments of labour force like construction workers, domestic servants, and other peripheral labour force of servitude are constantly in transit like the workers in IT/ ITES. The spatial location of the workers across two frames location and time are responsible also for a peculiar coexistence of primitive modes of accumulation and virtual economy on the other. The interface and the exchange between the two remain to be explored.

There is a sense of temporariness in the functionality of the spaces – be it the leisure zones, or the IT hubs where the workforce is not only alienated from its product but is not allowed to “situate” itself in the context, compared to the construction workers who stay and work day in and day out to create the imagined world. The New town is the new site of development where high rise towers are being constructed after forceful acquisition of land from the local community. The big real estate players are busy developing IT Parks, which are self sufficient and therefore can afford to sustain without much public interaction. A study of the spatial technologies of creating columns of high rise residential apartments, IT Parks in Rajarhaat, and the interface of capital and labour will be useful to understand that the global economy is in the process of becoming – perhaps always. The spatial technologies that are co-adapted by the business giants in various off-shores have a specific tale to tell and Rajarhaat in its transition from a large rural hinterland with plush green meadows, to a municipality area, and then to a place synonymous with “new” spaces of new workforce will show how notions of ‘borderless” world is about creating new spaces of exceptionality and desert zones – a new paradigm of development.