INTERACTIVE
India's Vector Capitalism Model
AUTHOR
AUTHOR
AUTHOR
“The Indian government has been pushing for health IDs with people's biometric data (Aadhaar). It was supposedly voluntary, but it was also required for food subsidies. Health spending in India was less than one percent in 2020—now, the government is commercializing its citizens' health data. Workers are made to work for data without meaningful consent. Many are not even told what they're signing up for.”
Live
Delhi
Event
In Grief In Solidarity
Aadhaar
COVID-19
Lockdown
Labor
Precarity
Standards of Living
Living Conditions
Biometrics
Commercialization
Health Workers
Health
Low-Income Workers
Labor Movement
Karnataka
Literacy
Consent
Investigative Journalism
Ethics of Journalism
Labor Reporting
Food Subsidies
Vector Capitalism
Neoliberalism
Essential Workers
Accountability
Production
The Great Pause
Pandemic
Agricultural Labor
Alienation
Scrap Workers
Caste
Isolation
Haryana's Industrial Belt
Automotive Industry
Assembly Line
Newsroom
Farmers' Movement
Gujarat
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DISPATCH
Live
Delhi
5th
Jun
2021
One woman who works in the industrial belt outside Delhi, at a Korean electronics firm. Her husband fell sick, and she lost pay for every day that she attended to him in the hospital. This is somebody who had worked at the same company for nine years, and was still treated like a temp worker. Though she's directly hired by the company, the contractor claims it helped to get her hired, refused to provide pay slips. This is a very common story for working-class workers during lockdown.
For our event In Grief, In Solidarity in June 2021, senior editor Sarah Eleazar spoke to labor journalist Anumeha Yadav, then based in Delhi, about India's response to the pandemic, the labor beat within a shrinking journalistic landscape, and how "vector capitalism" can explain the Indian state's neoliberal services and broad approach towards its workers in both the formal and informal sectors.
Yadav discussed her reporting regarding how the government's bizarre decisions at the height of the lockdown made life untenable for workers and the impoverished across the board. Barring the government's public pronouncement that landlords should suspend rent payments, Yadav argues that the testimony of workers and unrest, as seen in movements such as the farmers' movement or the harsh conditions of Gujarat, shows how the government engaged in mass abandonment while trying to commercialize the biometric data of over one billion people, as opposed to trying to mitigate the crisis.
Data harvesting was far more critical than work and living conditions and significantly more than preventative health measures, which were carried out in the most cursory ways.