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<p>The intricate relationship between labour and energy transition forms the cornerstone of a just transition. This article advances this argument through a dialectical account of India’s energy transition in rural eastern India. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the rural eastern Indian village of Srikhanda, it traces a contradiction between a developmentalist wage imaginary of <i>unnoyon</i> (progress) promised through secure <i>chakri</i> (formal jobs); and the reorganization of labour under post-coal transition conditions. This contradiction is mediated through two processes. First, the stalling of a thermal powerplant in the vicinity of the village that materialized an interrupted future of industrial wage-labour. Second, the proliferation of a livelihood associated with the informal electric paratransit vehicle locally called <i>toto</i> as a response to an uncertain future. Together, these processes rework livelihood strategies while reproducing precarity and caste and class inequalities. The energy transition thus appears not as a linear substitution of technologies but as a reorganization of labour relations and livelihood affordances. Thus, by centering livelihoods the article frames the energy transition as being navigated predominantly through labour relations.</p>

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Unnoyon, chakri and the toto: reimagining livelihood strategies and futures in the midst of the energy transition in rural Eastern India

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月13日

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  • Nikita Das

摘要

The intricate relationship between labour and energy transition forms the cornerstone of a just transition. This article advances this argument through a dialectical account of India’s energy transition in rural eastern India. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the rural eastern Indian village of Srikhanda, it traces a contradiction between a developmentalist wage imaginary of unnoyon (progress) promised through secure chakri (formal jobs); and the reorganization of labour under post-coal transition conditions. This contradiction is mediated through two processes. First, the stalling of a thermal powerplant in the vicinity of the village that materialized an interrupted future of industrial wage-labour. Second, the proliferation of a livelihood associated with the informal electric paratransit vehicle locally called toto as a response to an uncertain future. Together, these processes rework livelihood strategies while reproducing precarity and caste and class inequalities. The energy transition thus appears not as a linear substitution of technologies but as a reorganization of labour relations and livelihood affordances. Thus, by centering livelihoods the article frames the energy transition as being navigated predominantly through labour relations.