Skill as Problem-Space in the Contemporary Mumbai Construction Industry

As in many other major cities in India today, in Mumbai the building industry is characterized by a visibility and ubiquity that seem inescapable. Demolitions, renovations, and reconstructions reverberate as an integral part of the sensory experience of the city, while building complexes mushroom in the ever-extending periphery of the Greater Mumbai Metropolitan Region.

In certain ways, much about Mumbai’s building industry is visible, known, widely rumored, circulating, and “in the air.” Across a range of social locations, the subject of the building industry immediately leads to mention of “the politician-builder nexus,” referencing both a system of flows of cash from builders to politicians in exchange for access to land parcels on favorable terms and a broader fluidity in which politicians become builders, and builders politicians, with casual regularity.¹ While there is much about the financial operations of the industry that remains hidden, its corruption is at best a public secret: it is indeed no secret at all. This notoriety, coupled with the difficulty of financing large-scale projects, led the government to accord industry status to the construction sector in the year 2000, with the goal of making financing more transparent and more readily avail able.² As part of this new status, the industry is now treated as an employer, with a specific set of legal responsibilities in relation to its professional staff. However, more than 92 percent of those who work in the construction sector remain outside this legal employment relationship. These workers, typically migrants recruited from other parts of the state and from much farther afield, are hired and managed by labor contractors or subcontractors, such that there is no legal relationship between the builder and those who do the actual work of building. As with other aspects of the industry just described, those engaged in the work of building are at once an obvious presence and also from the outside rendered generic and invisible.

The larger study of which this essay is a part is interested in the dynamics of building and dwelling in the city, in the assemblages through which urban space and places of habitation are made, and also in the ways materials, forms of knowledge, labor, and skill are utilized, transformed, rendered visible or opaque. This brief essay develops a concept history of “skill” as an entry point for understanding some of the ways construction labor is being refashioned in the contemporary moment.³

The language of skill, and specifically of skilled labor shortage, appears to be a quite recent area of concern.4 But it has become integral to the narratives of builders and contractors who seek to position themselves as global businesses or as operating at an “international standard.”⁵ At the same time, this framing obscures the builders’ ongoing reliance on an organization of work centered on what is deemed “unskilled.” According to official figures from India’s Twelfth Five Year Plan (covering the years 2012–2017), in 2011, at the national level, some 83 percent of the workforce in the construction industry (including professional and managerial positions) were classified as “unskilled,” 9 percent as “skilled,” and the remaining 8 percent as divided among engineers, clerical staff, technicians, and foremen.⁶ In this context, defining most labor as unskilled may legitimate the low wages paid to these workers, while frequent references to a skilled-labor shortage may reflect builders’ anxiety about whether such a denigrated labor force can effectively produce the building quality demanded by a new global elite.⁷

The question of skill in labor also meshes with a broad campaign by the current government to develop a skilled youth labor force, as represented by the creation of a Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship in 2015 and of a variety of subsidiary agencies and programs, such as the National Skills Development Corporation, which works on a public-private partnership model.⁸ Governmental interest in creating a skilled workforce references its analysis of the industry’s longer-range needs, given increasing mechanization, and also highlights the broader benefits of an educated, skilled national workforce. As the Twelfth...