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Gig work has been considered 'disruptive' by platforms for its market efficiency, but concerns around precarity of work in the Global North have been raised since the early 2000s. In India, the dominance of informal work makes precarious work the norm, thus begging the question, does gig work disrupt or extend this precarity in new directions? Based on in-depth interviews with gig workers in India, this paper explores the relations between the informal economy and platform-based gig work in India with a focus on the experiences of workers. The paper argues that, much like informal work, gig workers bear a disproportionate risk, with their work regulated by social identities of caste and gender that determine entry and exit from work. The digital mediation of work in the gig economy extends such existing social relations of informal work into gig work, especially as labour remains deregulated by the Indian state. Through this, India points us in the direction of what the future of work may be for workers in a global digitised gig economy where such precarious and insecure work is now increasingly entrenched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The many Muslim women who make up India's burgeoning informal economy, challenge any attempt to reduce them to homemakers whose lives are delimited by culture and religion. An examination of their lives reveals the complex forces that shape their worlds, and illuminates how they variously negotiate landscapes of inequality in contemporary India. Here I focus on the biography of one Muslim widow to illustrate how she labours to live and dream in contemporary India as various social forces intersect to create precarity in her life. While neoliberal priorities and a shrinking social safety-net affect underprivileged women across religious lines, the intersection of gender, class, and religion in Hindu majoritarian India has made it even more challenging for low-income Muslim women like her to make ends meet. However, dominant forces are not totalising, and the biographical method reveals how one woman negotiates precarity, employing various skills as she adapts to changing conditions, juggling multiple jobs to meet expenses, and envisioning a better future. We see not just the deep inequalities that create precarity for some, but also how dreams can be a material force in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the irreverent and supposedly irrational actions of two protagonists, Prahlad and Shanta, characters that the authors encountered during the course of their extended fieldwork in Kolkata. Prahlad is an Oriya migrant plumber who passionately seeks god at the cost of making money, and resists adhering to rational economic behaviour in the city. Shanta is a grieving mother who relentlessly seeks justice for her son's disappearance during a revolutionary movement that consumed the majority of urban youth in the 1970s. Family, friends, neighbours and employers describe and at time dismiss rgen as pagla or insane. This article foregrounds these expressions of paglami or madness in Kolkata. We ask: how does close ethnographic attention to quotidian madness – its articulations, exploitations and resistances – enable us to rethink urban lives? We argue that dissension, alienation and 'unreasonable fixations' are affective thresholds of a changing city. They corroborate the ways in which the city's transforming political landscape impinges on its ordinary lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the 1950s up to the early 1990s the All-India data show an ever-declining share of informal credit in the total outstanding debt of rural households. Contemporaneous micro-level studies, using more qualitative research methodologies, provide evidence that questions the strength of this trend, and more recent All-India credit surveys show, first, a levelling, and then a rise, in the share of rural informal credit in 1990/91 and 2000/01, respectively. By reference to findings of a study of village moneylenders in Rajasthan, the paper notes lessons to be drawn. First, informal financial agents have not disappeared from the rural financial landscape in India. Second, formal-sector financial institutions can learn much about rural financial service needs from the financial products and processes of their informal counterparts. Third, a national survey of informal agents, similar to that of the 1921 Census survey of indigenous bankers and moneylenders, would provide valuable pointers towards policy options for the sector. A recent Reserve Bank of India Report on Moneylender Legislation not only explores incentive mechanisms to better ensure fair practice, but also proposes provision for a new category of loan providers that would explicitly link the rural informal and formal financial sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of public works programmes using the theory of real options argues that the effectiveness of these programmes can be studied by examining the switches the workers make between public works and other labour market activities. The wage rate between these two options is the focus of the analysis under the theory of real options. This paper critically examines the applicability of the econometric methods of the theory of real options by studying the same public works programmes through a local management perspective using a case-study approach. Local elites enjoy 'informal ownership' of public works programmes, and the rights of the poor are therefore shrouded in micro-politics. Besides, for a large number of the poorest people who are trapped in a vicious cycle of debt and seasonal migration, rights and options are foregone. The power of the local elites is discounted heavily in the approach of theory of real options. Relying on such outcome variables—which are manufactured by the local elites—can mislead policy decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]