ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on widened regional disparities between states in India. The distribution of relatively prosperous states is confined to western and southern India (or India’s Banana). To better understand this situation, the author examines the location pattern of leading manufacturing industries. The automobile industry was thus noted to form an ‘auto crescent’ that encompasses the National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi and has a spatial pattern most closely resembling that of a banana. The author’s investigation of the NCR indicates that contract workers, who have become a dominant workforce, mostly originated from a ‘contract workers’ belt’ extending from Uttar Pradesh to Bihar, constituting mainly younger men of a socio-economically vulnerable working class. The relationship between the auto crescent and the contract workers’ belt appears to have formed a centre-periphery structure. This chapter concludes that this structure may have an impact on the spatial divide of contemporary India’s national economy.
