Paper short abstract:

The ethnographic material explored in this paper shows how Adivasis and Dalits tend to remain at the bottom of India’s social and economic hierarchy when industry provides new livelihood options in a rural area, but also shows the deeply ambivalent relationship local Dalits have the factories.

Paper long abstract:

The world over, developers buying land for industrial development appease villagers by promising that local people will get jobs in the factories. Do local people get factory jobs? The ethnographic material explored in this paper suggests that this is the wrong question, and shows why and how Adivasis and Dalits tend to remain at the bottom of India's social and economic hierarchy even where a new industrial estate provides new livelihood options. In 'village X' in Tamil Nadu, local Adivasis are excluded from all but the very worst factory jobs, local Dalits have a somewhat preferable and yet highly complex and ambivalent relationship with factory employment, and Eastern Indian migrant labourers (mostly Adivasi and Dalit) have been brought in as a cheaper, more hard-working, and more docile workforce than the local Dalits. Local Dalits feel that a generation of their men and women have benefited from opportunities to work in the factories as low-paid, contract manual labourers, and that in many senses these jobs are preferable to the work they did before as agricultural daily wage labourers for higher caste landlords. At the same time, these local Dalits recognise that they continue to be pushed into highly-exploitative contract labour in the factory because opportunities to pursue better working conditions or alternative employment are limited by the complex interaction of relationships between the Dalit community and the local big landowners, the numerically-dominant Vanniyar community, the high caste factory managers and permanent employees, trade unionists, anti-pollution activists, moneylenders, and the police.