Towards Demystifying Self-Employment in India: Delineation, Dimensionality, Differentia

Labour markets have been undergoing significant transformations in the past few decades. The unprecedented dominance of self-employment including petty production especially in India warrants a detailed contextualisation, incorporating several complementary and simultaneous processes including rapidly declining employment especially for the most vulnerable and marginalised and the prevailing paradigm of growth delinked from development and creation of job opportunities. This paper attempts to locate the essential foundations of self-employment and petty production within the on-going process of primitive accumulation via the analysis of a burgeoning subsistence need economy especially microenterprises, and the expropriation of labour in both absolute and relative terms that masquerades as exclusion and marginalisation of even those already employed through evaluation of the components of quality of employment. Of necessity, gendered analysis is inbuilt at all levels and all layers. Also dealt with are extra-economic labour market structural inequalities as well as assessment of partisan governmentality through evaluation of budgetary support to self-employment.