Spatial organization of production in India: contesting themes and conflicting evidence

The emergence of space as a determinant in the functional relations linked to production and growth is a recent development in theories of industrial organization. This paper primarily reviews the contesting themes in explaining changes in relative importance of space. In reference to industrial clusters in India, the paper argues that it is the heterogeneity of the industrial organizations that captures ‘space’ as an analytical category and broad generalizations often do not address the spatial dimensions. Neither also is it true, at least for developing countries such as India, that small enterprise clusters always reflect the post-Fordist dimension of change in the production organization. In the context of global production chain, this paper further argues that participation in such value chains might lead to contradictory outcomes in production organization giving rise to increased rift between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’.endogenous growth, region, technology, fragmentation, footloose industry

High Non-Wage Employment in India: Revisiting the ‘Paradox’ in Capitalist Development

High non-wage employment persisting with high growth appears to be a paradox in capitalist development because commoditisation of labour power assuming the form of wage labour is specific to capitalism and the sole source of surplus value. This paper, drawing from various strands of Marxian literature, argues that capitalism never existed in isolation in ‘pure’ and pristine form, and the fundamental class process of surplus production is constituted by subsumed class processes and non-class processes that involve non-capital in several moments. Although the interaction of capital with the non-capitalist space signifies a confluence of separate processes, it overdetermines the existence and stability of capitalism by a complex dialectics of force and persuasion involving economic, political and ideological determinations.capitalism, non-wage employment,class process

Trends and Patterns in Consumption Expenditure: A Review of Class and Rural-Urban Disparities

This paper primarily aims to capture the changing patterns of consumption expenditure of three broad classes, namely, the ‘upper’ ‘middle’ and ‘bottom’ classes in the rural and urban India. In contrast to what is generally held that differences in consumption of necessaries across classes decline more the economy grows, this paper argues that there had been hardly any sign of convergence. Furthermore, in the cases of most of the food and non‐food items, especially, education and medical services the consumption expenditure in real terms is showing trends of a widening gap between the upper and the bottom classes.consumption, class, inequality

Footwear Cluster in Kolkata: A Case of Self-Exploitative Fragmentation

Studies in industrial clusters largely identify the institutional failures and imperfections that prevail in the supply of indivisible inputs and collective action. This paper critically reviews a typical ‘low‐road’ cluster in Kolkata and argues that market failures due to existence of information imperfections, externalities and public good and the institutional failure to resolve those imperfections only partially explain the depressed status in these clusters. The explanation, however, critically rests on the fact of asymmetric power relations and conflicts arising between the trader and the small producer reproducing a production relation that thwarts the high road growth path. The spawning of small enterprises in such clusters, as the argument goes, is a result of self‐exploitative fragmentation that does not flow from entrepreneurship but is a result of survival strategy of labour in the context of depressed wages.contested exchange; self-exploitative fragmentation;

Structural change in employment in India since 1980s: How Lewisian is it?

Indian economy shows high levels of growth and per capita income in recent years accompanied by an unprecedented shift of labour from agriculture to non-agriculture during the last decade. Reallocation of labour from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ segments in an economy having large surplus labour was conceived in the Lewisian framework as the process by way of which both accumulation of capital and exhaustion of surplus labour takes place. This paper argues that the structural change in employment in India that results from the exclusionary nature of the growth process hardly approximates the Lewisian trajectory. Finally, in the context of globalisation this paper explains the responses of firms of various size categories in non-agriculture and argues that the shift in employment basically expands the ‘reserve army of labour’ in the Marxian sense instead of exhaustion of surplus labour conceived in Lewisian conjectures.growth, employment, non-agriculture, structural change,reserve army of labour

Structure and topology of transcriptional regulatory networks and their applications in bio-inspired networking

Biological networks carry out vital functions necessary for sustenance despite environmental adversities. Transcriptional Regulatory Network (TRN) is one such biological network that is formed due to the interaction between proteins, called Transcription Factors (TFs), and segments of DNA, called genes. TRNs are known to exhibit functional robustness in the face of perturbation or mutation: a property that is proven to be a result of its underlying network topology. In this thesis, we first propose a three-tier topological characterization of TRN to analyze the interplay between the significant graph-theoretic properties of TRNs such as scale-free out-degree distribution, low graph density, small world property and the abundance of subgraphs called motifs. Specifically, we pinpoint the role of a certain three-node motif, called Feed Forward Loop (FFL) motif in topological robustness as well as information spread in TRNs. With the understanding of the TRN topology, we explore its potential use in design of fault-tolerant communication topologies. To this end, we first propose an edge rewiring mechanism that remedies the vulnerability of TRNs to the failure of well-connected nodes, called hubs, while preserving its other significant graph-theoretic properties. We apply the rewired TRN topologies in the design of wireless sensor networks that are less vulnerable to targeted node failure. Similarly, we apply the TRN topology to address the issues of robustness and energy-efficiency in the following networking paradigms: robust yet energy-efficient delay tolerant network for post disaster scenarios, energy-efficient data-collection framework for smart city applications and a data transfer framework deployed over a fog computing platform for collaborative sensing --Abstract, page iii

Garments Industry in India: Lessons from Two Clusters

Garment industry worldwide is undergoing significant restructuring since the final phaseout of the Multi‐fibre Arrangement. The changes are taking place in terms of relocating production sites on the one hand and coping with the new competition on the other. In this context the paper tries to look into the status of garment industries in India and see how the assumed release of constraints in demand both through liberalization in domestic trade policies and by phasing out of multi‐fibre agreement has impacted upon the growth and size distribution of firms in the sector. The paper focuses on how the responses of individual firms are embedded in the evolving patterns of production organization, labour processes and institutional arrangements related to respective industrial sites.size distribution; clusters; institutions; agglomeration

High Non-Wage Employment in India: Revisiting the ‘Paradox’ in Capitalist Development

High non-wage employment persisting with high growth appears to be a paradox in capitalist development because commoditisation of labour power assuming the form of wage labour is specific to capitalism and the sole source of surplus value. This paper, drawing from various strands of Marxian literature, argues that capitalism never existed in isolation in ‘pure’ and pristine form, and the fundamental class process of surplus production is constituted by subsumed class processes and non-class processes that involve non-capital in several moments. Although the interaction of capital with the non-capitalist space signifies a confluence of separate processes, it overdetermines the existence and stability of capitalism by a complex dialectics of force and persuasion involving economic, political and ideological determinations