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Abstract

The informal sector in India, as in other developing countries, is a source of employment and livelihood to an overwhelmingly large proportion of workers. Although the urban sector has been widely studied by social scientists around the world, not much research has been done on the non-agricultural rural informal sector, which has witnessed significant growth in the recent past. Based on an ethnographic field study of the handloom workers of Bihar, India, the article briefly describes the production process in the handloom industry, and drawing from the critics of economic development theories, it tries to explain how social networking in the rural labour market can affect economic outcomes. The findings of the study illustrate a unique kind of social networking in the handloom industry arising from caste and religion, which can be associated with notions of embeddedness and social capital.

Keywords

Rural informal economy handloom textile seasonal migration social embeddedness

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Rural Handloom Textile Industry in Bihar: A Case of Rural Informal Sector

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