Articles by M Vijayabaskar

Based on shifts in Tamil Nadu’s economy and polity, the prospects for emergence of political alternatives to the two dominant Dravidian parties are examined in the context of the upcoming assembly elections. Despite the emergence of cracks in the constituency forged by Dravidian mobilisation, the core elements of Dravidian ethos continue to hold electoral appeal.

In recent years, “youth” has emerged as a distinct category of population to be governed in India. Policy efforts to realise the “demographic dividend” amidst an agrarian crisis have however not met with success as suggested by reports of jobless growth on the one hand and poor quality of employment generated outside agriculture on the other. What are the prospects of improving youth livelihoods within agriculture? Can the youth revive the prospects of agriculture? Improving incomes within agriculture while also paying sufficient attention to caste and gender relations that shape labour hierarchies, access to land, youth preferences and mobility aspirations is critical to imagining a future that sustains agriculture and youth livelihoods.

Mega infrastructure projects such as industrial parks and special economic zones are increasingly seen as a means to jump-start urban economies in India. This paper contributes to understanding the politics of urban mega-projects by examining the quality of local economic linkages of an information technology park, located in what is popularly referred to as the "IT corridor" in Chennai. Based on a survey of employees in software firms and support services for IT parks along the corridor, the paper maps patterns of employment creation, new consumption and mobility patterns of those employed in the IT parks and implications for the quality of urban development.

There are suggestions that caste networks can be used as a means to reduce transaction costs and promote economic development. Based on critiques of the "social capital for development" literature and the experience of the knitwear cluster in Tiruppur, this article contends that caste-based economic networks reinforce socio-economic hierarchies and generate new forms of exclusion.

Even as state governments invest in social welfare measures, they are forced into constant competition with one another to attract private investments, offering a good "investment climate" that includes access to a low cost workforce and a physical infrastructure geared towards capital accumulation. The need to provision welfare within an accumulation regime premised on global competition, fiscal austerity and marketisation, and a simultaneous need to reduce labour costs and to ensure social security, to exclude and include labour appears paradoxical. Does this emphasis on social welfare by the local state imply resistance to or accommodation of the current growth paradigm? How does such welfare provisioning influence livelihood strategies of labour embedded in global production networks and subject to flexibilisation? What are the new spaces of mobilisations that the regulatory imperatives open up? This paper addresses these questions through a microlevel study of worker livelihoods and state regulation in Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu that has been integrated into global networks of commodity production through garment exports.