[Urbanstudy] Is that female a contractor?

[mythri]

I am currently part of the Sarai Student Stipendship Program.Focusing on the road construction sites in Trivandrum city,Kerala, my research attempts to understand the political economy of urban infrastructure building in the context of a regime of privatization. Pieces of legislation concerning roads, documents of international lending agencies and the public works department, conversations with workers and visits to their living quarters and work sites, and interviews with local contractors, engineers and workers are the major sources of this study.
What are the implications of the movement of global capital represented by companies like Punj- Lloyd for local capital?

I attended a two-day construction summit organized by All Kerala Government Contractors’ Association in November 2005 organised in Hotel Windsor Palace in Kottayam. Listening to Varghese Kannampalli , the association’s president one gathers an urgency in his voice.

"We are standing on the footboard of a super deluxe bus, not allowed to enter the bus. We pick up and eat the orange peels thrown out of the bus. We have to rush forth into the bus. We need to take initiative for a liberation struggle (vimochana samaram)"


In the construction summit held at Kottayam, local contractors realized the importance of possessing expensive machinery. They were contemplating the formation of equipment banks whereby five or six of them pool in money to buy expensive equipments. In fact, as part of the summit there was an exhibition of equipments and a presentation of their various uses and functions by representatives of Larson& Toubro Case Equipment Private Ltd. The presentation consisted of a promo of a few road-building equipments and an offer of discount of Rs. 40, 000 for the participants of the summit. The advertising jingle of a loader backhoe (L&T Case 851) heard in the summit makes for an interesting read.  

This is world’s latest technology
It is technology that is proven in work sites across the world. Now it comes to you.

Eight Five One is the One
It is strong and sturdy 
Working all day long

L&T Case.
It gives you more
It helps you soar
 
Eight five one is the One.

The L&T Case 851
Is the brute with brain
The marvel with muscle
Its High-tech Hydraulics


The appeal is to the listener’s masculinity and it explicitly invokes the man-machine relationship and a certain technical sociability which usually excludes women. But the lone woman contractor in the meeting and an engineer by training, Ms.Lata Kumari seemed to be the only participant who could comment in detail about these equipments. As she participated in the discussion, I overheard a contractor asking another: “Is that female a contractor? (Aa pennumbilla contractor aano?)”.
What I witnessed was a subversion of the terms of man-machine relationship, immediately recognized and acknowledged by the men with surprise and suspicion. To confront and negotiate global and big capital and the regime of gigantic machines in road building, the local contractor had to graduate from an individual entrepreneur at the mercy of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the public works department to a businessman who can summon men, machine and materials at short notice. The local contractors, most of whose entrepreneurship was shaped in an agrarian setting, seem to be struggling in this respect. 
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