These figures appear to be representative of South Asia as a whole. This panel will explore the causes and consequences of this dramatic deterioration in the position of labourers.
Evidence suggests that the burden of falling earnings has been borne disproportionately by women.
As a consequence, women have become increasingly dependent upon men within the family and household and the value of domesticity has been strengthened. The decline in labourers' standards of living may be traced to the rise of the British colonial state, which from its earliest days sought to discipline and cheapen labour. It did this by eliminating rights possessed by labourers in the pre-colonial order, but without replacing them with new rights such as democracy or civil liberties, which became the basis for labourers' struggles in Europe. However, the granting of these liberal rights in independent India has done little to improve labourers' lot, which suggests important continuities in state discourse and practice between the colonial and post-colonial periods. According to conventional wisdom, poverty has existed in India for several centuries.