Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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couple of other routes for Gounder workers to enter the industry. These are
routes opened up as a part of the bigger
firms strategy of capital accumulation,
helping themselves against market uncertainties and avoiding legal obligations
to labour. Bigger firms in order to escape
fulfilling legal obligations to labour and
to avoid problems of maintaining a large
labour force, encourage long-standing
workers, most often belonging to the
same caste as that of the owners, to move
out and set up units of their own. They
were invariably supplied with secondhand machinery and orders to work on
in the initial phases. Such provision of
gratis capital was particularly prevalent
during the 1970s and early 1980s. Given
the low investment and technological
requirements, especially in the earlier
phase, workers often teamed up together
to start a unit of their own. Mostly, it
was done with the help of second-hand
machinery with operations being carried
out in household premises.
Since then, there has been an influx
of white-collared employees from the
formal sector, both public and private,
teaming up with locals with a good
knowledge of the industry to start exportoriented units. Else, they would work for
a period of six months to one year in
their friends or kins firms before setting
up units of their own. With their social
capital more attuned to the process of
accessing global markets and loans from
formal lending institutions, many of them
have succeeded. Caste thus morphs into
capital among the Gounders in Tiruppur,
facilitating capital mobilisation for entry
into the sector. However, the unevenness of the process is missed out in the
explanation based on caste as social
capital. All routes of entry are not however available to all Gounders. While
access to land and certain kinship networks constitute the axes of such intracaste variations, need for additional
attributes to transact with global buyers
further excludes sections of Gounder entrepreneurs. Entering into direct exports
requires an ability to interact and negotiate with global buyers, an attribute
that is unevenly distributed among the
entrepreneurs. Lack of formal education
among workers and small peasant-turned
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them,9
that disadvantaged
a major issue
reported by the entrepreneurs was lack
of access to markets despite having access to high quality imported machinery
for knitting and embroidery. Orders
have to be invariably sourced through social networks, which are mostly controlled by the Gounders. Despite the fact
that many of them had tertiary education and were ex-employees of the public
sector, they could not enter these networks. Entrepreneurs are able to enter
into such networks either through kinship ties or through having worked with
other entrepreneurs over a period. In
the absence of either kinship or other social ties, dalit entrepreneurs found it extremely difficult to run the machines at
optimal capacity. Caste-based networks
thus once again enable some sections to
gain even as they exclude by generating
strong entry barriers. In other words,
while the social capital argument looks
at caste in discrete terms, we have pointed out that caste indeed is relational
one caste creating entry barriers to
other castes.10
Following this failure, in 2007, the
government helped the sick enterprises
to come together to float a new company,
the Tiruppur Apparel Park India, that
would take care of marketing issues.
While there was a revival in the fortunes
of some of the units through this effort,11
marketing efforts could not be sustained.
Outside the TAHDCO estate, a few dalit
workers have tried to become entrepreneurs by taking up job work for
exporters and tier-one contractors. They
purchased second-hand stitching machines
by pooling in some money and undertook only stitching operations for a few
firms during peak season. Being a labour
intensive operation, they started on the
presumption that their capital requirements would be minimal. However, what
they had not bargained for was the need
for working capital to meet the weekly
wage bill of the workers and the possibility of delayed payments by the outsourcing firms. Their ability to rely on
credit was severely undermined by their
lack of collateral. Gounder entrepreneurs by virtue of their access to land
could address this demand much more
easily than the dalits. While some of
vol xlIX no 10
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Notes
1 The Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (SJM) is the
economic wing ofthe Hindu Right.
2 S Gurumurthy (2009), Is Caste an Economic
Development Vehicle?, The Hindu, 19 January,
accessed at http://www.hindu.com/ 2009/01/
19/stories/2009011955440900.htm, on 31 August 2013.
3 Swaminathan A Aiyar (2000), Harness the
Caste System, The Times of India, 4 June,
http://swaminomics.org/harness-the-castesystem/, accessed at 31 August 2013.
4 Indias Strength Is Its Industrial Clusters, interview with S Gurumurthi, convenor of Swadeshi
Jagaran Manch, 8 April 2003, on rediff.com,
http://www.rediff.com/money/2003/apr/08
inter.htm
5 For a discussion on this, see Ben Fine (2007).
6 http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/
EXTTSOCIALCAPITAL/0,,contentMDK:201851
64~menuPK:418217~pagePK:148956~piPK:21
6618~theSitePK:401015,00.html, accessed at
15 April 2013.
7 This discussion is primarily drawn from Harriss
(2001) and Fine (2010).
8 The elaboration of entrepreneurship formation
in the knitwear industry and the subsequent
discussion on differentiated nature of capital
and power within entrepreneurial networks
is drawn from Vijayabaskar (2001); Raman
Mahadevan and Vijayabaskar (2012).
9 http://www.hindu.com/2005/02/19/stories/
2005021908130500.htm, accessed at 15 April
2013.
10 This is brilliantly captured by B R Ambedkar in
his essay The Annihilation of Caste wherein
he characterises caste as a system of graded
inequalities.
11 http://www.hindu.com/2007/07/23/stories/
2007072359791000.htm, accessed at 15 April
2013.
12 In this regard, Rammanohar Lohias understanding of caste as a form of insurance is hugely
NEW
References
Bourdieu, Pierre (2008): The Forms of Capital in
Nicole Woolsey Biggart (ed.), Readings in Economic Sociology (London: BlackwellPublishers).
Cawthorne, P (1995): Of Networks and Markets:
The Rise of a South Indian Town: The Example
of Tiruppurs Cotton Knitwear Industry, World
Development, Vol 23, No 1, pp 43-56.
Chari, Sharad (2004): Fraternal Capital: PeasantWorkers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in
Provincial India (Stanford: Stanford University
Press).
Coleman, James (1988): Social Capital and the
Creation of Human Capital, American Journal
of Sociology, Vol 94, Supplement: Organizations
and Institutions: Sociological and Economic
Approaches to the Analysis of Social Structure,
pp S95-S120.
Damodaran, Harish (2008): Indias New Capitalists:
Caste, Business and Industry in a Modern Nation
(New Delhi: Palgrave Macmillan).
Das, Gurcharan (2002): India Unbound From Independence to the Global Transformation Age
(New Delhi: Penguin Books).
Fine, Ben (2007): Social Capital, Development in
Practice, Vol 17, Nos 4/5, pp 566-74.
Jandhyala B G Tilak
India has a large network of universities and colleges with a massive geographical reach and the facilities for higher
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