ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the link between labour practices and material living of construction workers. It notes that real wages of workers engaged in railroad building and other construction works in 1860s Deccan improved. The subsistence ratios of sweat workers, however, mostly remained below the unity of one. The presence of coerced, dependent labour marked labour practices. The labouring poor secured the basic family consumption by increasing the supply of family labour on the labour market and agitating for wage revision. Here, women and boy coolies were far from receiving a wage rise anyway comparable to their male counterparts. This scenario of economic living of workers was attributable to the interplay of the constraining instrument of labour control on one side and the economic incentives for better labour efforts on the other. Furthermore, the nexus between caste, gender, race, and occupations proved conducive to significant wage inequality.
