ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief map of terrain of informal economy and its linkages with contemporary capitalist development, migration, democratic politics and state welfare in India, with an intension to demonstrate the urgency for further, detailed studies on the changing dynamics of the informal economy in the postcolonial context. The overall shrinking of the informal economy will result in the decline in the quantum of social subsidy that it transfers for sustenance of profit-oriented accumulation economy, which is already under significant crisis. Moreover, devastation in the informal economy means an inevitable reduction of the ‘consuming power’ of 90 per cent of Indians, leading to a massive crisis of demand. Reduced consumption leads to the ‘epidemic of overproduction’. By this term, Marx referred to the ‘overproduction of commodities relative to effective demand’ – too much supply to chase too little demand. The pandemic called Covid-19 is married to the pandemic of overproduction, which is a ‘built-in tendency’ or systemic in capitalism.
