Skills, caste, and class in an eastern Indian steel town, 1950s-2000s

Abstract

The paper discusses notions of skill and practices of skilling among industrial workers and managers of the large public-sector Rourkela Steel Plant in the eastern Indian state Odisha. Based on long-term ethnographic research in the steel town Rourkela I trace how the complex interplay between state, capital and labour produced a specific local steel skill ecology, how it shapes and is shaped by ethnicity and caste, and how it changed over time. As I will show, the requirements of industrialization as well as Nehruvian nation-building in what was in the 1950s an ‘internal periphery’ that was the turf of an ethnically defined regional Odia nation-building project fomented ethnicised and casteist rivalries among the workforce. As a corollary, ethnicised and casteist notions also tinged local formalised and informalised regimes of skilling, as well as the recognition and the understandings of skills. In the 1970s and even more so since the 1990s, Rourkela’s specific skill ecology changed. The town had then turned into a major industrial centre and the public-sector steel plant started externalising labour to precariously employed contract workers; and later also restricted permanent employment to a smaller number of formally skilled workers. In the wake of these processes, class differences among the workforce evolved that built on unequal access to formalised skills and that overlay, but not replace, differences in terms of ethnicity and caste.