5 - The supply of unskilled labour

Summary

It was in the past considered by most writers on Indian economic affairs that Indian labour was immobile, difficult to discipline, and often scarce in a country with abundant population. By implication or explicitly, therefore, the supply of labour was supposed to have been a serious constraint on the growth of industry in India in the recent past. Some of these ideas about the irrationality and intractability of the Indian labourer have fared no better than crude ideas about the irrationality of the Indian peasant, when faced with detailed research.

But there is a danger that the myth of the agriculturist factory-worker of India may be replaced by the myth of the rootless Indian labourer, whose ‘natural’ supply price is the subsistence wage and whose condition is entirely governed by the high rate of population growth. The fact of the matter is that just as in other fields, so in the field of labour relations the laissez faire practised by the Government of India was a policy rather than the absence of one. Just as in the field of industrial production it ‘naturally’ led to the favouring of British or, rather, European traders and industrialists, so in the field of labour supply it led to a policy of increasing the mobility of Indian labour with a view to pushing it into British-managed plantations and factories.