This key theme of my research agenda focuses on informal economy, which provides livelihoods to vast majority of the working population, as a roadblock in the expected path of structural transformation. Analysing its dynamics by relying on various national-level survey datasets and primary surveys in India, I draw implications for the nature of post-colonial capitalism.
Informal economy and a manufacturing versus services-led structural transformation in India | in-progress
In this work, which is currently at a preliminary stage, I am exploring the possibility of a manufacturing versus services-led structural transformation process for the Indian economy over its recent growth period between 2010 to 2023.
Trajectories of labour market transitions in the Indian economy
forthcoming in World Development
Author: Rosa Abraham and Surbhi Kesar
The Indian economy, despite registering high growth, has been experiencing a stunting in its structural transformation process, which has manifested in the form of vast and persistent informality across wage and self employment. To study whether there are key systematic patterns of labour transitions and other related dynamics that characterise the labour market in light of this stunting, we employ a group-based trajectory analysis over eight time-points between 2017 and 2019 using high-frequency panel data from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE)’s Consumer Pyramid Household Surveys.
Subcontracting Linkages in India's Informal Economy
Journal article published in Development and Change (2024)
Author: Surbhi Kesar
Using nationally representative survey data for the Indian informal manufacturing sector, this article examines the nature and patterns of subcontracting linkages for informal family-based household enterprises over the high-growth period of 2001–2016. The prevailing nature of subcontracting relations in India's informal economy, even during the peak growth period, appears to be starkly different from the dynamic linkages that are celebrated in the literature as a channel for facilitating growth and transition.
Policy piece Ideas for India
Economic transition, dualism and informality in India: Nature and patterns of household‐level transitions
Journal article published in Review of Development Economics (2023)
Author: Surbhi Kesar
I examine the Indian economy during a peak period of high growth between 2005 and 2012 using India Human Development Survey to analyse the nature and patterns of household-level transitions across different sectors, characterised by varying degrees of formality/informality and various production structures and labour processes. My analysis highlights the complexity of India's contemporary development trajectory, whereby the pre-existing economic structure is reproduced, paradoxically, through a continuous reshuffling and reconstitution of economic spaces, accompanied by significant volume of ‘unfavourable’ household-level sectoral transitions.
Media reporting Hindustan Times
Invited lecture Delhi Economics Society | Informality, Dualism and Economic Development in India
Podcast SOAS DevTrac | Informal Economy: New Approaches
Exclusion, surplus population, and the labour question in postcolonial capitalism:
Future directions in political economy of development
Journal article published in Review of Political Economy (2023)
Author: Snehashish Bhattacharya, Surbhi Kesar, and Sahil Mehra
In this expository essay, we argue for building a fresh research programme in the political economy of development to analytically investigate and empirically substantiate the specificities of postcolonial capitalism. A key theoretical framework developed through the work of Kalyan Sanyal may be built upon, reformulated and productively deployed for this purpose. We provide a purposive engagement with this framework, its critiques, and the extant literature that develops it further.
Precarity and development: Production and labor processes in the informal economy in India
Journal article published in Review of Radical Political Economics (2022)
Author: Snehashish Bhattacharya and Surbhi Kesar
We focus on the informal economy in India to show that the notion of precarity conceptually involves three distinct aspects of production and labor processes—“non-capitalist” petty commodity production (PCP), subcontracted PCP, and informal wage-labor. We argue that these dimensions have their own particularities that have distinct implications for the process of capitalist development in India. We contend that reproduction of these informal spaces during a period of high economic growth unsettles the imaginary of development as transition.
Podcast A correction
Dualism and structural transformation: The informal manufacturing sector in India | 2020
Journal article published in European Journal of Development Research (2020)
Author: Surbhi Kesar and Snehashish Bhattacharya
We identify a basic dualism within the informal manufacturing sector in India between a ‘traditional’/non-capitalist segment, comprising family-based household enterprises that constitute the vast majority of the IMS, and a segment of ‘modern’/capitalist enterprises employing wage labour. Focussing on the high-growth decade of 2000–2001 to 2010–2011, we show that while, on one hand, the average ‘traditional’ enterprise has been able to economically reproduce itself rather than withering away, the dualism between the ‘traditional’/non-capitalist and the ‘modern’/capitalist segments has been reproduced and further reinforced, raising questions about the process of economic transformation.
Possibilities of transformation: The informal sector in India
Journal article published in Review of Radical Political Economics (2018)
Author: Snehashish Bhattacharya and Surbhi Kesar
We identify a dualism between capitalist and noncapitalist spaces within the vast informal sector in India, and show that this dualism has been reproduced and reinforced during the past decade of high economic growth. This calls into question the idea of capitalist transition that informs much of the discourse on economic development. We provide some preliminary arguments about the nature of this dualism and the process of reproduction of the noncapitalist economic space.