Contract Labour in Construction Industry: (An Empirical Study with Reference to Tripura) An Old and Rare Book

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No comprehensive study of the condition of labour engaged in the construction industry of India has yet been undertaken. The present book based on author's field study in Tripura aims to fill in an important gap. A characteristic of construction industry is its employment of labour on casual basis. This is said to be due to two main reasons. One is seasonal fluctuation of construction activities leading to instability in employment. The other is the absence of multi-skill among the labourers for which they are to move from one project to another or one stage of work to another. This apart, the existence of public tendering system provides a scope to a large number of people to take up construction jobs; and as a result the industry's scale of operation has become small. This has given rise to certain limitation to maintain an even flow of work on the part of a particular firm or employer even when the demand for labour from the industry's point of view can be stabilised at a certain level. The author, on the basis of primary data, suggests that if the quantum of construction investment can be maintained at a certain level and if there are suitable scheduling and staggering in construction activities, intermittent and seasonal unemployment can be eliminated to a large extent. In other words, given certain organisational changes, the construction industry can maintain a stable level of employment.

Besides, the author has shown that the principal force in wage determination for the lowest paid construction labourers in Tripura is not, contrary to popular belief, the cost of living, nor this has been adequately reflected in the official minimum wage provision in different states of India. Thus, given the assumption that labour productivity is a function of wage (and not vice versa), the regressive character of minimum wage has severely affected the well-being of the labour force.

S. N. Guha Thakurta, Reader in Economics a the North-Eastern Hill University. Shillong. Received his Ph. D. degree in Economics from Calcutta University in 1972. He has taught Economics at the M. B. B. College (1962-69), Women's College (1969-72) and at the Calcutta University post-graduate department of Economics at the M. B. B. College (all of Agartala Tripura) during 1972-74. In January 1975 he joined NEHU.

His publications include numerous papers on a wide range of topics in Economic and Political Weekly, Economic Affairs, Assam Economic Journal and Tripura Review, and a book on Tripura under the Land and the People series of the National Book Trust, India (in Press).

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to all those who helped and encouraged me directly or indirectly to complete the study. I am particularly grateful to Professors Mani Bhushan Suryal of the Calcutta University and to T. S. Papola of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, for their invaluable suggestions and helpful comments, to Dr. S. N. Sen, former Vice- Chancellor, and Professor and Head, Department of Economics, Calcutta University, Dr. Kartik Lahiri of M.B.B. College, Agartula, Sri Nirmalya Dutta, B.E., also of Agartala, for their constant encouragement and help, to Professor R.V.T.K. Rao (of M. B. B. College, Agartala) who read thoroughly an earlier draft of the book for his stylistic suggestions, and to Professor S. Sarkar and Sri S. Ghosh for helping me in computation. Needless to mention that none of them are in any way responsible for any flaw in the argument or any error that may still remain.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the North-Eastern Hill University for financially helping me to publish the book. The University, however, cannot be held responsible in any way for the views and opinions expressed by me in this book. I also offer my sincere thanks to the Editor, Economic and Political Weekly, for giving me permission to draw liberally from the materials earlier published by me in that journal (Vol. V-12, 1970; Vol. VI-42 and 43, 1971 and Vol. VII-11, 1972), to Mr. Stoermann, Chief of the Industrial Committees Branch, Relations and Conference Department of the International Labour Office, Geneva, for sending me many valuable reports of the Building, Civil Engineering and Public Works Committee of the I.L.O., to Sri Salil Ghosh for jacket design and to Miss Banani Ghosh, M.A., for helping me in preparing the index.

Finally, I would like to express by deep gratitude to the construction firms, contractors, sub-contractors and their labour force for their response in my field investigation.

Wild and fierce rivers have been tamed into placid lakes, bramble bushes and bamboo forests into modern townships; cities have come around old village huts and multi-purpose projects have been built in places where human beings once dreaded to tread. But what about the men behind these stupendous achievements? The present study which is somewhat an abrid- god and updated version of my earlier thesis (approved by the Calcutta University for Ph. D. degree in Economics in 1972), primarily aims at this. But the chief difficulty that one encounters in studying the problems of contract labour in construction industry is the lack of time series data both at the State and at the all-India level. The literature on Indian labour economics has so far dealt with the organised labour. Of the unorganised labour, agricultural labour has received considerable attention. The all-India Agricultural Labour Enquiry Reports and various micro-level studies have released sufficient data on them. But the study of contract labour in general and of contract labour in construction industry in particular has hardly been undertaken seriously.

Burnett-Hurst in his Labour and Housing in Bombay (Lon- don, 1925) has given a very brief factual account of a few aspects (viz., demand for and supply of labour, seasonal variation, local labour market) of labour engaged in building construction in and around Bombay. Radhakamal Mukerjee in his Indian Working Class (Bombay, 1948) has dealt with the conditions of contract labour in general and of contract labour engaged in quarries, mines and sugar industry in particular. While dealing with the absuses of the system of contract labour and suggesting their removal from "certain fields of work... where con- tract labour is incidental to the processes of the industry itself", Mukerjee hinted that in the field of construction the contract system may be "forced by the necessity of quick execution and by the kind of work altogether different from industrial operations