Write short note: Industrial class structure in India. (1997)
India’s industrial classes are a colonial creation. Before the nineteenth century there were working people but no working class, because there was no factory system. British capital, by building mills, mines, railways and an administration, produced simultaneously an entrepreneurial class, a salaried bureaucracy and a wage-earning proletariat.
Colonial origins
A mercantile and industrial middle class and a new bureaucratic-administrative class emerged in the port cities. The business elite came largely from traditional trading castes — Jains, Baniyas and Kayasthas around Calcutta, Parsis and Gujaratis in Bombay, Chettiars in Madras — first as brokers to British firms, later as competitors. As Yogendra Singh notes, this dual inheritance of commercial tradition and close involvement with the national movement shaped the role the business elite later played in modernisation.
The strata
| Stratum | Composition |
|---|---|
| Industrial bourgeoisie | Owners of large capital, predominantly family business houses; since independence, managed through professional industrial bureaucrats |
| Managerial and white-collar | Salaried technical, supervisory and clerical staff — a class position defined by credentials, not property |
| Organised permanent workers | Large-factory and public-sector employees drawing a family wage, with statutory protection and career mobility |
| Unorganised and contract workers | Casual, contract and piece-rate labour in construction, brick-making, small units; below them a reserve army in petty trade and rag-picking |
The class line within labour
Mark Holmstrom insisted that workers share only a few interests, not all, and that a class line must be drawn between the organised and unorganised sectors. Heather Joshi and Vijay Joshi (Surplus Labour and the City, 1976) specified four dividing criteria — wages, working conditions, security and social worlds — and studies of Bombay and Coimbatore found almost no movement across that line, because recruitment runs through friends, relatives and caste networks rather than open competition.
The rural link
Morris David Morris (The Emergence of an Industrial Labor Force in India, 1965) showed that the Indian worker never fully severed the village tie, whether because labour was scarce and courted or surplus and abused. The consequence was absenteeism, high turnover, slow unionisation and a class consciousness cross-cut by caste, region, language and religion.
Conclusion
The structure is therefore differentiated rather than dichotomous: a multi-structural economy in which pre-capitalist and capitalist relations coexist yields several working classes, not one. That this remains the defining feature is visible in the Annual Survey of Industries 2022-23, where 40.7% of factory workers are contract workers — informal labour inside formal enterprise.