4. Female Labor Workforce and Precarity in India’s Construction Sector

Excerpt

Human Security (HS), a paradigm which came out of the United Nations Development Program in 1994, was ground-breaking in the realm of International Relations. In essence, the HS paradigm is meant to shift focus from state security to individual security. Since then, critical and feminist HS scholars have levied criticisms against HS, including that it has not attended to local contexts enough and that it has been too western and liberal in its approach to analyzing and enhancing people’s security. My research takes those critiques seriously. Despite their vast numbers and work-related challenges, very little is known about how Indian women construction workers experience and conceptualize Human Security—either before or during the COVID-19 crisis. Hence, my research fills a gap in HS scholarship. Utilizing a feminist grounded approach, I have sought to understand HS from the perspective of the laborers. What I found on the ground led me to see that the theoretical approaches of precarity and informality together shed light on the HS of Indian women construction workers—particularly during this tumultuous time of COVID-19. …