Mining and automobile manufacture in India

Car manufacture

Balance sheet of Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Strike

Gurgaon Workers’ News assess the recent massive strike at Maruti Suzuki auto in India.

Preliminary Balance Sheet of the 13-Days Sit-Down Strike at Maruti Suzuki Factory in Manesar/Gurgaon, India

India: Wildcat strike at Maruti Suzuki continues, may spread

The strike at the Indian carmaker’s Manesar plant has entered its sixth day, with threats of similar strikes at other plants being made.

The wildcat strike exploded a week ago, with around 2,000 workers demanding the recognition of a new union – Maruti Suzuki Employees Union (MSEU) – formed by those working at the Manesar plant, among other things.

Around 1,000 workers from different firms in the Gurgaon-Manesar industrial belt gathered at the gate of MSI’s Manesar plant today to express solidarity with the MSEU strikers.

Mining

The Jharkhand Movement

The state Jharkhand was formed in November 2000, before that the mining areas of Dhanbad-Jharia and the steel manufacturing regions around Bokaro and Jamshedpur were situated in the southern part of Bihar.

The Dhanbad Mafia

In India the name Dhanbad is synonymous with coal mafia. Together with the ‘nationalised command’ over the mines appeared a ‘mafia mode of production’, which was both part and outcome of the re-structuring process.

Illegalised mining

‘Illegal mining’ existed before nationalisation, it emerged – it was ‘illegalised’ – with the introduction of land property titles and the encroachment of common land by the colonialism.

Also read:

• Dhanbad, India – Report from a Visit in the Coal Fields
• Coal Mining in India
• The Dhanbad-Jharia coal-mining area
• The Coal-Mining Sector during Colonialism and after ‘Independence’
• The Period 1971 to 2011: A Short Summary
• The Nationalisation 1971 – 1973
• Mechanisation
• Casualisation and (Re-)Privatisation
• The Situation Today: A Visit in Dhanbad

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More news behind the headlines

In this edition, the shifting sands of power in the Middle East, the alliance between Iran and North Korea, the politics of India’s oil supply, Vince Cable’s corrupt dealings, and why Mongolia matters.

Is Libya trying to sell off its shipping fleet? – By Robert Zeliger

blog.foreignpolicy.com – How desperate is Muammar Qaddafi to raise cash? According to a new report, the Libyan leader is trying to unload the country’s fleet of 22 shipping vessels as economic sanctions and continued fight.

Why Mongolia Matters « Commentary Magazine

commentarymagazine.com – Our colleague Michael Rubin makes a good case for why we should care about Mongolia as well as why we should reject the realpolitik that would have the United States eschew friendship with small st..

How Saudi Arabia and Qatar Became Friends Again – By Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi

foreignpolicy.com – In the spring of 2006, Qatar’s then energy minister broke his silence on a stalled, multibillion-dollar project to supply Qatari gas to Kuwait. “We have received no clearance from Saudi Arabia” he…

North Korea and Iran increase collaboration on nuclear missile, report claims

telegraph.co.uk – It was capable of manufacturing high strength steel that Iran has been unable to manufacture. Iran has instead relied on carbon fibre materials that are less reliable.”What previously had been a on…

‘India can cope with oil supply halt’

timesofindia.indiatimes.com – NEW DELHI: India has back-up plan to cope with a halt to crude supplies from Iran, oil minister S Jaipal Reddy said, as the Islamic republic upped the ante in an oil payments row and Indian refiner…

Cable flies into controversy with £32m for Westland Business News, Business

independent.co.uk – AgustaWestland has secured a £22m government loan to build the new AW169 helicopter at its Yeovil factory, along with £10m in research and development grants. The funds, announced by the Business…

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Chart of the week: food inflation in India

Food prices rose rapidly in India during December (Calcutta Telegraph)

China and India in pictures

From Peter Hoskins in the Spectator:

1. This first graph suggests that – allowing for the relative values of different currencies – China’s GDP will top the US’s around 2020. India’s does likewise just before the 2050 endpoint:

2. The picture for each country’s GDP as a percentage of the world economy is more eye-catching still. Here, the US drops consistently from now until 2050, while China and India rise inexorably:

READ THE REST.

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News from the Special Exploitation Zone

Image via Wikipedia

Gurgaon in Haryana is presented as the shining India, a symbol of capitalist success promising a better life for everyone behind the gateway of development. At a first glance the office towers and shopping malls reflect this chimera and even the facades of the garment factories look like three star hotels. Behind the facade, behind the factory walls and in the side streets of the industrial areas thousands of workers keep the rat-race going, producing cars and scooters for the middle-classes which end up in the traffic jam on the new highway between Delhi and Gurgaon. Thousands of young proletarianised middle class people lose time, energy and academic aspirations on night-shifts in call centres, selling loan schemes to working-class people in the US or pre-paid electricity schemes to the poor in the UK. Next door, thousands of rural-migrant workers uprooted by the agrarian crisis stitch and sew for export, competing with their angry brothers and sisters in Bangladesh or Vietnam. And the rat-race will not stop; on the outskirts of Gurgaon, Asia’s biggest Special Economic Zone is in the making. The following newsletter documents some of the developments in and around this miserable boom region. [READ THE REST.]

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COMMENT: Ending Africa’s Hunger [Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez & Annie Shattuck]

Image via Wikipedia

More than a billion people eat fewer than 1,900 calories per day. The majority of them work in agriculture, about 60 percent are women or girls, and most are in rural Africa and Asia. Ending their hunger is one of the few unimpeachably noble tasks left to humanity, and we live in a rare time when there is the knowledge and political will to do so. The question is, how? Conventional wisdom suggests that if people are hungry, there must be a shortage of food, and all we need do is figure out how to grow more.

This logic turns hunger into a symptom of a technological deficit, telling a story in which a little agricultural know-how can feed the world. It’s a seductive view, and one that appears to underwrite President Obama’s vision for ending hunger. In an interview with an African news agency, he shared his frustration over “the fact that the Green Revolution that we introduced into India in the ’60s, we haven’t yet introduced into Africa in 2009. In some countries, you’ve got declining agricultural productivity. That makes absolutely no sense.” In a squat beige Seattle office buildi

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• Eric Holt Gimenez: Food Sovereignty Chronicles (huffingtonpost.com)
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COMMENT: Moving Parts [Ruchir Joshi]

Moving Parts: Prajapati

Ruchir Joshi, 15 March 2010

In this excerpt from Ruchir Joshi’s ‘Moving Parts’ series, Ruchir visits the silica quartz processing-plant in Godhra where many local workers claim that hazardous working conditions are resulting in serious health problems

Moving Parts part 2: Hajiriya and Gajiriya

Ruchir Joshi, 22 March 2010

In this second excerpt from Ruchir Joshi’s ‘Moving Parts’ series, Ruchir visits two brothers, Hajiriya and Gajiriya, who have contracted the terminal disease Silicosis as a result of their work at the silica quartz processing-plant in Godhra.

Moving Parts part 3: Guddu and Pintu

Ruchir Joshi, 29 March 2010

In this third excerpt from the Moving Parts series Ruchir travels to the town of Khhair with cousins Guddu and Pintu, where Ruchir learns about the systematized corruption involved in the Indian construction business.

ANALYSIS: India’s big guns bazaar [Nitasha Kaul]

The recent Indian Defexpo 2010 (February 15-18) was “Asia’s biggest arms bazaar”, the sixth biennial exhibition of land and naval defence systems, with over 650 companies and official delegations from many countries around the world assembled in New Delhi. There was much discussion (for example, a lead article in Time magazine declared ‘For the Arms industry, India is a hot market’) not only of what was on offer but also of issues such as the potential of the Indian defence market (estimated to be 100 billion USD by 2020) and the growing presence of US, Israel, and even the UK as sources of competition for the traditional Indian business partners, such as Russia.

[READ THE REST]