Defending Informal Workers’ Welfare Rights: Trade Union Struggles in Tamil Nadu

The South Indian state of Tamil Nadu has had a rich history of informal workers’ movements and struggles that have pressured the state government to enact statutory schemes and set up worker welfare boards to extend social protection to informal workers. This article discusses the efforts of two prominent trade unions in the state to secure welfare benefits for informal workers, and explores the primary challenges, conflicts and dilemmas they have faced. It explores the troubled interfaces between trade unions and the worker welfare boards that the unions regard as the fruit of workers’ struggles and collective organising of the past. The unions have used the welfare boards to mobilise new occupational categories of workers as well as women workers in the lower rungs of the informal sector. At the same time, the welfare boards are a double-edged sword that the unions must carefully manage given the frustration and disappointments that ensue when the promise of social protection remains elusive to workers. Placing this case study in the larger context of labour movements across the world that have won contingent victories in protecting workers’ interests and well-being, the article raises troubling questions regarding the implications of these victories in neo-liberal state regimes. KEY WORDS: informal workers; trade unions; welfare rights; labour organising; Tamil Nad

A new scheme to reduce session establishment time in session initiation protocol (SIP)

The session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has been developed by Internet Engineering Taskforce standard (IETF) with the main purpose of establishing and managing sessions between two or more parties wishing to communicate. SIP is a signaling protocol which is used for the current and future Internet Protocol (IP) telephony services, video services, and integrated web and multimedia services. SIP is an application layer protcol, thus it can run over Transmission Control Protocol(TCP) or User Datagram Protocol (UDP). When the packets are sent over the network, a form of congestion control mechanism is necessary to prevent from network collapse. TCP is a reliable protocl and provides the congestion control by adjusting the size of the congestion windows. UDP is an unreliable protocol and no flow control mechanism is provided. Many applications of the Internet require the establishment and management of sessions. The purpose of the thesis is to study the session establishnment procedure in SIP and try to reduce the time taken for the session setup in two different conditions. One, when there is no congestion in the network, and the other is when there is a network congestion. We have simulated the behaviour of session establishment in SIP using Network Simulator (NS2). UDP is used as the transport protocol. We have created different network topologies. In the topology we had created SIP user agents who wants to communicte, proxy servers for forwarding the requests on behalf of the user agents, and a Domain Name Server (DNS) which maintains the location information of all proxy servers. We tried to reduce the time taken for the session establishment. As UDP does not provide any congestion control mechanisms, we used the binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm to set the timers. In our network topolgy when there is no packet loss in the network, the time taken for the session establishment is reduced from 0.86 sec to 0.574 sec. In case of network congestion the setup time is reduced from 4.55 sec to 2.86 sec. From the simulation, we conclude that the session establishment time can be reduced by reducing the number of message exchanges required for session setup

The vulnerability of 'self-help' : women and microfinance in South India

Self-help groups (SHGs) play a major role in providing microfinance in India. But they do not work alone. State institutions are also a big part of the microfinance landscape. They promote and finance SHGs, and also interact directly with them. How does this kind of ‘institutionalised co-production’ in service delivery work in practice? My research shows that the relationships are not symmetrical. When they seek access to bank credit, women’s groups are in a dependent relationship, and are subject to, and tarnished by, the institutional imperatives, systemic corruption and political compulsions that shape the behaviour of rural development bureaucracies and banks. Part of the problem lies in a legacy of bank staff mistrusting borrowers due to arrears from previous credit granted under a different set of public schemes. Banks still try to recover old loans, and sometimes grant new loans to womens’ SHGs conditional on repayments by their male relatives. Women consider the ways in which bank officials assess credit-worthiness of SHGs as sometimes being discriminatory and suggestive of caste-profiling. Since banks, as institutions, are not very sensitive to the realities of their SHG borrowers, the quality of the relationship often depends on the attitude of the bank’s branchmanager. Success in accessing loans is often contingent on how SHGs, bank staff, government officers and non-government organisations collude to subvert the official objective of the loan programme – enterprise-promotion. Manufacturing evidence about non-existent enterprises involves substantial costs and risks for SHGs. Providing financial services in rural India is now a profitable venture and is attracting private financing institutions, including transnational banks. My research suggests that we need to enquire further into the power dynamics that underlie relationships between the poor people using the financial services and their providers. Keywords: Self help groups, microcredit, Tamil Nadu, co-production, gender, caste, banks, development bureaucracy, enterprise loans, policy subversion, corruption, power relations

Feminizing Responsibility? Women’s ‘Invisible’ Labor and Sub-Contracted Production in South India

Since the 1980s and 1990s, there has been growing global recognition and endorsement of women as economic actors whose income-earning activities contribute to the survival and livelihood security of impoverished households and communities in many parts of the developing world. Women’s economic contribution is considered particularly valuable when population groups living below the income-poverty line have struggled to cope with the adverse social effects of neo-liberal economic reforms. Given this backdrop, the aim of this study is to examine closely women’s experience of laboring in the lower end of the informal labor sector, their workspace negotiations and conditions of labor, and to assess the significance of women’s work to the survival and well-being of their households. The paper focuses on a case study of home and neighbourhood-based food production units in order to show how women’s labor in these units is shaped by the intersecting dynamics of household patriarchies on the one hand and the profit maximizing ends of private capital, on the other. Primary data was gathered through interviews and focus group discussions with women workers and owners of these units located in the working class and industrial belt of North Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The paper argues that there has been an excessive responsibilizing of the women who work long hours in unregulated workspaces and feed and care for their families, often in the face of male disengagement from supporting the household. While aid agencies and national governments valorize women for their efficiency in ‘managing’ household poverty and sustaining fragile livelihoods with skill and ingenuity, this study foregrounds the gender-unjust implications of vesting poor women with the prime responsibility for alleviating global poverty

Studies on osmoregulation in the penaeid prawn Metapenaeus dobsoni (Miers)

Metapenaeus dobsoni (Miers) is the most abundant species along the coast of Kerala. It is cultured extensively by adoption of traditional farming practices. The geographical location and water source determines the seasonal and annual environmental fluctuations the prawn farming systems experiences. The life cycle of the shrimp includes its migration to the coastal deeper waters for spawning and the immigration of larvae to the estuaries for growth. The survival of the species in such complex ecosystems is thus critical to its life cycle. The animal adapts itself to different environments through a physiological process known as osmoregulation. The present study on osmoregulation in the penaeid prawn Metapenaeus dobsoni was thus undertaken to understand the mechanism adopted by this species to survive in different environments. A number of experimental work have been conducted to understand the effect of salinity on the internal variations. However the effect of the complex environmental conditions as existent in nature on the osmotic variations in this species has not been dealt with in any of the earlier studies

Review on Socio-Cultural Dialectical Records of Malasar

In the state of Tamil Nadu, there are many tribes. In particular, Malasar tribal people are located in and around area's of Pollachi, Anaimalai, and Kinathukkadavu taluks of Coimbatore district.  Malasar people are categorized as Schedule Tribes. In recent studies, the Scholars and Researchers have examined the living conditions of the Malasar Tribes through Folklore, Anthropology, Sociology and Botany. At present, the Language of Malasars are undefined which may result in the destruction of their cultural aspects. Even after 75 years of India's independence, the Malasar tribes continue to struggle for livelihood in the absence of basic rights. Rights-based comprehensive studies and democratic debates with scientific data to ensure socio-economic development and cultural recovery of Malasar tribes should be enhanced at its level

The ‘Stigma’ of Paid Work: Capital, State, Patriarchy and Women Fish Workers in South India

This paper explores the changing dynamics of women’s labor in a Muslim fishing village in the South Indian state of Kerala in the back drop of two global processes viz., state-initiated capitalist modernization of the fisheries sector and state-sponsored livelihood promotion programs. It traces the shifting contexts in which Muslim fisherwomen, alternately, engaged in and disengaged from, paid work outside the household and shows how women experienced different kinds of paid work, as self-employed fish vendors and wage earners of employment guarantee schemes. Changes in women’s labor force participation were mediated by the social institutions of family and religion, community patriarchies and ideologies of female domesticity and the state’s endeavors to constitute women as entrepreneurial actors who take responsibility for the economic well-being of their households. The paper maps women’s struggles to secure and retain paid work in the face of a resurgent domestic feminine ideal and its zealous defenders in their village