ABSTRACT
Introduction The growing interest in Indian employment relations has been primarily sparked by the economic reform programmes pursued by the Indian government since 1991 (Agarwala et al . 2004; D’Costa 2005; Papola et al . 2007; Ahsan and Pages 2009; Hill 2009; Budhwar and Bhatnagar 2009). These economic policies of liberalization, privatization and globalization marked a new beginning in the trajectory of the Indian economy which hitherto was typifi ed as an inward-looking socialist-style economy, based on an import substitution strategy. Following the balance of payment crisis in 1991, the government of India embarked upon economic reforms which shifted the focus from import substitution to an export orientation (D’Costa 2005). This shift in economic policies has increased the country’s GDP growth from a low 2-3 per cent per annum until the 1980s to an average of 8 per cent per year for a decade and half starting from the early 1990s (Panagariya 2008). It is argued that this change in economic policies has impacted employment relations, with trade unions in India now fi nding themselves increasingly excluded from the political process, affecting employment relations at both national and state levels (Kuruvilla and Erickson 2002). In this chapter, we shall fi rst examine the historical evolution of employment relations in India, followed by the role of key stakeholders, namely, the state, trade unions and the employers. We then look at the salient employment relations outcomes in India and, fi nally, we shall attempt to explain the developments in Indian employment relations from various theoretical perspectives.
