Non-farm futures and the dispossessed: mapping manual labour in an industrial area in India

In this paper, non-farm trajectories for the dispossessed are interrogated through a case where the state acquires agricultural land for an industrial area in Maharashtra, India. The empirical case arguably presents an ‘ideal type’ to observe the possibilities of a classical ‘transition’ to factory employment for dispossessed rural landholders in the neoliberal era. In the manufacturing hub that develops, male and female members from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe groups carve out precarious manual labour opportunities. By disaggregating informal labour by caste and gender and identifying mechanisms through which work is made and kept precarious, the analysis adds specificity to debates on both rural dispossession and informal labour.