Technological Change in Kerala Industry:Lessons from Coir Yarn Spinning

Technological backwardness is a crucial fact of Kerala's industrial life. The major industries in Kerala, coir processing, handloom weaving, and beedi-making are marked by the use of low productive technologies. Further, development of industry in the State, among other factors, thus crucially hinges on technological modernisation. Technological change is, however, not merely a matter of finding new machines for old. It involves several other important social questions. As these questions could be expected to unfold with many a detail only on micro-examination, the study particularly focused on three villages in southern Kerala, which are important centres of coir yarn production. Coir industry was chosen for examination because of its social and economic importance.coir, coir yarn, technological backwardness, Kerala, technological modernisation, Economics, Industry

Transverse Solidarity: Water, Power and Resistance

Conceived as Transverse Solidarity, the Cola Quit Plachimada struggle in a rural hamlet in the Indian state of Kerala reveals how the socio-economic sustainability of communities is of as much importance as environmental, cultural, and political justification for a social movement and its success. The implicit theoretical notion is further enriched and elucidated by the ethnographic narration of a plurality of contested issues and struggles at multiple sites of power. The study addresses how a water-based subaltern movement gradually grew into transverse solidarity within the space between civil society and the state/governing institutions, politicizing them and consequently making allies of them, and how the discursive and material practices of structure-authorities and macro-power relations were contested