Presentation short abstract

Examining India's electric vehicle transition, this paper interrogates capital's 'green' realignment deepening precarity, and the variegated response of labour. It argues the transition's core contradiction is its intensification of social crisis, making capital's solution its own undoing.

Presentation long abstract

The global shift to electric vehicles (EVs) intensifies the automotive sector's historic role as a socio-technical crucible, forcing a strategic re-alignment of capital and the state. This transition reconverges the energy, tech/digital, and extractive mining sectors, creating new global alliances and deepening ecological pressures.

India's automotive sector, vital to its manufacturing and GDP and integrated into Global Automotive Value Chains, is a key site for this transformation. National policy, driven by urban pollution and climate imperatives, actively pushes electrification, while automakers forge new ties to critical mineral supply chains. However, this "green" transition is being built on a "low-road" labour regime.

Based on research in the Pune automotive cluster (2024-25), this paper reveals how restructuring for electrification—through plant closures and new facilities—systematically deepens reliance on a precarious workforce. The transition intensifies the sector's reliance on precarious labour, leveraging gendered, migrant, and 'deskilled' identities as instruments of control, even while discourses of feminization, re/up-skilling, and new 'green jobs' are hegemonic. The paper explores the resulting fragmentation of the workforce and the emergent, variegated responses from labour in factories, regional clusters, and across the supply chain. It argues that a 'just transition' is impossible without confronting the sector’s foundational political economy and forms of labouring in India. Ultimately, this case illuminates how the decarbonization model—in the absence of an industrial policy centred on sovereignty and labour—seeks to resolve ecological crises by intensifying social ones, making the crisis of capital a permanent feature of its own proposed solution.