The politics of dispossession in an Odishan steel town

Abstract

The article discusses how industrial workers in Rourkela, a steel town in Odisha, experience the large-scale job losses entailed by the recent restructuring of India’s first public sector steel plant. In this article, I argue that this manpower reduction presents a moment of what Harvey (2003) calls accumulation by dispossession and which he considers as the hallmark of neoliberal capitalism. Importantly, I add to Harvey’s analysis that this process is experienced, and acted upon, in significantly different ways by different fractions of the town’s steel workforce. Taking a long-term historical perspective, I will show that these differences are rooted in the politics that the postcolonial regional state of Odisha has pursued in the town since the 1950s. In methodological terms, the argument put forward in this article follows Burawoy’s (2000) call for an ethnographic ‘grounding’ of global processes such as neoliberalisation that pays attention to how such processes shape and are shaped by local histories of dispossession and resistance against it.