Fieldwork in Rajarhat-New Town (located on the north-eastern shoulder of Kolkata, West Bengal) carried out by the Transit Labour Research Platform concluded with the Transit Labour Workshop. It remained primarily focussed on the case-study of Rajarhat, with at least four formal presentations exclusively dedicated to the theme. Lateral connections with other material and geographical contexts — China (Shanghai), for example, but also the UK and the USA among others — were, of course, productively drawn and the upshot was a more nuanced understanding of transit labour and how it operates in the space of new townships. Changing patterns of labour and mobility, its precariousness, were discussed conjointly with deliberations on ‘newness’: new political spaces, new processes of global-economic integration, new modes of urban reckoning. However, the discussion spilled beyond the confines of a purely logistical and formal engagement with transit labour to embrace knotty questions of identity-reckoning and belonging, dispossession and resistance, loss and re-deployment of livelihood opportunities. Such a denial of theoretical formalism had to, perhaps inevitably, be the fate of a research orientation which began with a concept: transit labour. For, as Georges Canguilhem tells us in La formation du concept de reflex aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, concepts are “theoretically polyvalent”; the same concept can function in quite different theoretical contexts. Ineluctably, then, discussion of a concept presupposes a distinction from standard discussions that merely trace a succession of theoretical formulations. If this is conceded, the workshop was a success.

New technologies of governance, labour and the logistics industries.

Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

Boarding Gate C10, Suvarnabhumi Airport: midnight approaches at the end of the concourse, beyond the malls and gates collecting passengers for Singapore and Hong Kong. A long line of young Indian men wait to weigh their hand luggage before boarding the Kolkata flight. These are kuruvis, low-level ‘hand-carriers’ employed by shadowy bosses to transport consumer goods like electronics and garments between Thailand and India. Not surprisingly their pre-weighed luggage comes in exactly at the maximum weight allowance. But it is also carefully apportioned according to value, each carrier transporting just enough to stay under the Rs 5 Lakh limit that attracts prosecution for smuggling electronic goods into India. When the laden flight docks in Kolkata, the baggage hall is resplendent with commodities: plasma televisions, hi-fi systems, musical keyboards, not to mention the iPods, mobile phones, digital cameras and computer circuit boards stowed in makeshift bundles of shabby cloth. This is a full-scale logistical operation – a single link in the many networks of formal and informal labour that distribute consumer goods manufactured in China to markets around the globe.

Suhit K. Sen

The Rajarhat story is fundamentally a story of displacement, loss of livelihoods and ecological degradation brought about by West Bengal’s Left Front government in cahoots with a real estate mafia allied to business interests. So what’s new? There is something new about the story of the building of a new township in Rajarhat and that is what this piece will focus on.