sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 5

Indranil Chakraborty / Steven High (eds.): Deindustrialization and Economic Restructuring in Post-Reform India

This book is a welcome contribution to the expanding field of deindustrialization studies, opening the window to a more honestly global understanding of the phenomenon. India is an interesting case-study given the well-documented historical deindustrialization of its cotton industry by the British colonial regime in the 19th century, as well as its unusual post-independence economic development. Beginning in the 1990s, India experienced a high level of service-sector (tertiary sector) led growth, an unprecedented development at the time. The volume approaches the question of (de)industrialization in the context of both domestic and international neoliberal reforms since the 1990s through the lens of different regions of India. It analyses how issues such as globalization, internal migration, religion, caste, class, gender, labour reforms, and the gig-economy, among others, impact industry and employment in a developing country context.

Postcolonial India is an illustrative example of the complex links between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth - generally termed simply economic growth - and related changes in employment and development. Economic growth is necessary to allow development, but development is not a pre-requisite for growth. While economic growth should theoretically enable an increase in employment opportunities for a country's labour force, India's remarkable levels of economic growth (post-1990s) have not resulted in better conditions of employment, nor equitable socioeconomic development, as this volume showcases in abundance. Instead, the benefits of growth have been unevenly distributed, increasing inequality rather than alleviating poverty, and exacerbating the situation of already disadvantaged communities. Thus, even in the early 2000s when India's GDP was growing at rates of 6-7 percent per annum, this tertiary sector driven growth was concurrent with regional deindustrialization.

As a so-termed developing economy, or one that is in the process of undergoing what both economic theory and historical example consider the classical path of economic growth and development through industrialization, the case of India challenges the idea that deindustrialization is a uniquely post-industrial phenomenon. While tertiary-sector led growth still expands employment opportunities, these vary considerably depending on the socioeconomic echelon of the workers. Secondary sector led growth - industrialization through an increase in manufacturing - typically increases low-skilled jobs, which leads either to a dual-economy of primary (agriculture) and secondary (manufacturing) sector dominance (as was the case for India in the 1960s), or facilitates a transition from primary to secondary sector led growth through rural-urban migration. In the case of India, employment in manufacturing has stagnated in recent decades, resulting in "jobless growth" (166), and a concurrent expansion in service-sector jobs. The service sector has two defining differences in employment opportunities from the manufacturing sector: It has a certain proportion of jobs which are only accessible to an educated workforce (e.g. the IT sector), a challenge for any country whose populace is not fully literate; and the sector's growth and stability are dependent on the consumption of those who are economically able to drive demand for services. High income and wage inequalities in India result in a pyramidal consumption structure, which means that a large amount of service-sector employment is generated through the consumption patterns of a proportionally small elite.

In this regard, deindustrialization is felt through change in types of employment, with a move towards contracted rather than permanent or regularized labour, and a shift in the distribution of workers across different industries. As a result, there has been a decrease in the average real wage over time, not including informal/unorganized sector workers. In fact, the informal sector comes rarely into the conversation on deindustrialization because the literature has thus far looked predominantly at unionized and formal workers. This is a vital contribution that this book offers. Organized campaigning and strikes are only possible if labour is unionized and workers are represented. But, as the authors acknowledge, if the bulk (90-93 percent) of the Indian labour force remains in the informal sector and largely unrepresented, then studying the statistics of the organized workforce alone is insufficient as an analysis of the state of a developing country.

The volume shows some inconsistency in its treatment of the IT industry, at times presenting it as an industry in its own right and at others situating it-more accurately-within the services sector. The IT sector's high growth-low employment model has tended to employ a particular kind of white collar worker, exacerbating a class-divide and discrimination against historically disadvantaged communities in India. This selective employment is not, however, necessarily correlated to job losses in the manufacturing sector, which targets workers in a very different socioeconomic echelon. Thus, the growth of the IT industry is contiguous to, rather than a result of, a stagnation of or decline in manufacturing.

The principal global angle apparent throughout the book is a depiction of the post-1990 era as one of international neoliberalism. India then becomes one part of this larger trend but is subject to the consequences of its domestic economic restructuring, as well as the shifts in international trade and the popularization of global supply chains. This appears more strongly in some chapters than in others, with Chapter 8 on the township of Batanagar (West Bengal) placing these local-national-global links at the forefront of its analysis. Whereas in Western Europe and North America, the breaking of contract between employer and employee has largely been studied in the context of locally or nationally grown firms, here we see the same dynamics recur in a multinational company, with Bata's global deindustrialization enforcing employment shifts to the detriment of the local workforce.

This edited volume makes a timely and substantive contribution to the study of deindustrialization by opening up new analytical terrain. Its study of India as a developing economy foregrounds overlooked regional experiences, enriching broader debates on globalization and structural change. When examined in historical perspective, industrialized countries experienced a longer-term, more natural evolution of the economy, while also benefitting from unregulated trade and the colonial extraction and exploitation of resources. In this scenario, deindustrialization comes as an expected economic shift, albeit with local and national-level disruption to secondary sector employment. In developing economies however, premature deindustrialization acts instead as an interruption to the process of industrialization. Deindustrialization in this context has a very different impact on employment, growth, and development, often occurring simultaneously to industrialization. As such, this book serves as both a valuable reference and a catalyst for future research in the field.