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Status Quo Anti
This article argues in favour of dismantling the Industrial Disputes Act. For several decades now, the provisions in the IDA have been the leading factor behind the irrationality and smallness of enterprises in India. The article further emphasises the issues for the “post-coronial” economic development of India.
An earlier, much abridged internet version of this article was published by the Indian Journal of Labour Economics in 2020 titled “Think ‘Big’: Strategizing Post-Coronial Revival in India.”
The author is grateful to Subhashish Gangopadhyay for his detailed comments on the article.
The lockdown has left behind one searing image and that is of a collapsed collage of many video shots showing migrants trudging home that is hundreds of miles away. It communicated long moments of desperation, but in equal measure, love and caring too. These sentiments came through, distilled and clear, for poverty does not dim them, as it does the fear of death.
Well after our first contact with the visuals, we can still see, in our mind’s eye, the image of a daughter carting her father, parents carrying children, a husband clinging to his dead wife. Because they now did not have a home, the poor were forced to bare their emotions in the open, on highways, in bus stops, and in railway stations. Such scenes need not have happened if these fleeing multitudes had jobs with security, state-sponsored universal healthcare, affordable housing and unemployment insurance. They did not come to the city to run back in abject fear of the unknown.
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