Silicosis and the state: valuing life and labour in contemporary India

Thesis

This thesis is an ethnography of a state welfare scheme for communities affected by silicosis, a lung disease caused by hazardous working conditions, in Rajasthan, India. It examines the different normative frameworks and political logics that have informed the creation, everyday operations of, and people’s experiences of the government compensation programme for occupational disease. Based on sixteen months of participant observation in a stone-carvers’ trade union and an NGO-run health clinic, this thesis provides an account of how activists, trade unionists, workers, bureaucrats, and doctors understand and negotiate state recompense for silicosis. The first part of this thesis traces the moral reasonings that underpin different forms of monetary restitution to injured workers. In the second part, this thesis shows how moral and political logics shape how people experience social protection programmes, and demonstrates that moral values are also vehicles through which activists can contest the limitations of state welfare for informal workers.

This thesis challenges understandings of welfare that focus solely on how such programmes are constituted and designed, by drawing attention to the moral values and political contestations through which welfare is given meaning. It argues that while the opaque and inaccessible nature of the programme constrained activists and claimants, it also generated a fertile ground within which informal workers organising in trade unions could mobilise. It shows how informal workers and activists leveraged their position to make expansive demands for the regulation of factories, to contest medical determinations of their illness, and to craft relations of mutual aid among workers of diverse castes and tribes. This threads the underlying moral logics of welfare together with the aspirations of activists seeking to exceed bureaucratic rationalities and make wider claims for justice.

Authors: Iyer, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-aoaqgye5a
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Rajasthan; India; welfare state; South Asia; trade unions; occupational health; silicosis
• Subjects: Law and anthropology; socio-legal studies; South Asian Studies; development studies