02401nam a22002297a 4500 20261003172633.0 261003b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d 9789385957314 : Savera Book Distributors : 4754, Akarshan Bhawan, 23 Ansari Road, Darya Ganj, New Delhi : 26-27/CRB/682 : 25/09/2026 322.209 NAI Nair, Manjusha. Undervalued Dissent : Informal Worker's Politics in India. / Manjusha Nair. New Delhi : Meena Book Publications , 2018. xv, 231p. : 24cm. 906 Historically, the Indian state has not offered welfare and social rights to all of its citizens, yet a remarkable characteristic of its polity has been the ability of citizens to dissent in a democratic way. In Undervalued Dissent, Manjusha Nair argues that this democratic space has been vanishing slowly. Based on extensive fieldwork in Chhattisgarh, a regional state in central India, this book examines two different informal workers’ movements. Informal workers are not part of organized labor unions and make up eighty-five percent of the Indian workforce. The first movement started in 1977 and was a success, while the other movement began in 1989 and still continues today, without success. The workers in both movements had similar backgrounds, skills, demands and strategies. Nair maintains that the first movement succeeded because the workers contended within a labor regime that allowed space for democratic dissent, and the second movement failed because they contested within a widely altered labor regime following neoliberal reforms, where these spaces of democratic dissent were preempted. The key difference between the two regimes, Nair suggests, is not in the withdrawal of a pro-labor state from its protective and regulatory role, as has been argued by many, but rather in the rise of a new kind of state that became functionally decentralized, economically predatory and politically communalized. These changes, Nair concludes, successfully de-democratized labor politics in India. “This book is a significant contribution to a growing understanding of the precarious nature of work, be it in formal or informal sectors.” Industrial relations Political aspects Labor policy Manjusha Nair. BOOK 70856 70856 0 0 ddc 0 0 SNUL SNUL 2026-10-03 Savera Books 906.00 0 322.209 NAI 31836 2026-10-03 17:26:49 2026-10-03 BOOK