New on the website of RUPE: Digitalisation’s Marginalising Impact on India’s Unorganised Sector

by Arun Kumar

Digitalisation and formalisation are projected by the Government as a solution to the Indian economy’s problems. However, digitalisation has further damaged the unorganised sector without formalising it. Demand has been shifting from the unorganised to the organised sector. Given that the organised sector is more capital intensive than the unorganised sector, this demand shift has resulted in decrease in employment generation, greater inequality and shortage of demand, which have led to the economy slowing down. However, since the size of the unorganised sector is not independently estimated, it is invisiblised in the data.

This article is part of Aspects of India’s Economy no.s 81 & 82, Digitalisation in India: The Class Agenda. Other articles from the issue are soon to be released.

Read more at:

https://rupe-india.org/aspects-no-81-82/digitalisations-marginalising-impact-on-indias-unorganised-sector

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Relaunching the website of Aspects of India’s Economy

Dear friends,

We have re-launched the website of Aspects of India’s Economy at https://rupe-india.org. Please do visit it and give us your responses so that we can improve it. We are sorry that the site has been down for quite some time as we were building the new site. Do help us in spreading the word and popularising the site once more. (We would also like to thank the artist-activist Anupam Roy for allowing us to use his powerful artworks on the site.)

We have retained our earlier website as an archive of earlier issues, at https://rupe-india.org/old-site/ . We are profoundly grateful to those who ran it all these years.

Shortly we will publish on our site the latest issue of Aspects, Digitalisation in India: The Class Agenda. Articles from varied contributors cover questions such as:

— the impact of digitalisation on the unorganised sector (Arun Kumar),

— ‘smart’ cities (Hussain Indorewala),

— ‘digital health’ (Indira Chakravarthi),

— the digitalisation of education (Manali Chakrabarti and Rahul Varman),

— digitalisation and welfare programmes (Rajendran Narayanan), and

— digitalisation and precarity (Anurag Mehra).

In a closing piece, RUPE will comment on the overall drive and agenda of digitalisation in India and its impact on various sectors, including the agrarian sector.

We eagerly look forward to comments and criticisms from our readers.

Rajani X. Desai,

Editor, Aspects of India’s Economy

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