Mobility, Migrancy and Globalisation: City-spaces in Kerala

Abstract

Even a cursory investigation of the labour market in Kerala, South India would reveal the ever-increasing presence of migrant workers in different occupations in the state, ranging from hotel work and ironing clothes to laying telephone cables and constructing roads and buildings. Besides Tamils of the neighbouring state, there are workers from West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and Karnataka. While there is a long and interesting history of migration from Tamil Nadu to Kerala, especially to the plantations, movement of workers from the north and the north-eastern states of India is a fairly recent phenomenon and is related to the increase in construction activity. I studied the movement of capital and labour to the urban infrastructure building in Kerala, focusing on the road construction sites in the city of Trivandrum managed by Punj-Lloyd Ltd, as part of my MPhil dissertation. A close reading of the documents published by the World Bank and the Public Works Department and documentation of their everyday practices revealed that the movements of capital and labour which mediated the construction process take place against the backdrop of a changed institutional matrix where the rules of the game are drawn up by international lending agencies and consultancy companies. This involved a process of “creative destruction” (Brenner and Theodore 2002) of the state public works department by superseding the existing institutional framework rooted in developmentalism with new marketfacilitating state institutions like Road Fund Board for coordination of construction activity, thus mobilizing the building of urban infrastructure as an arena of accumulation for global capital.