| Summary: | <p>This thesis explores the emergence of government compensation for silicosis in India by interrogating two main ideas: first, that compensation for workplace disease is an outcome of a shifting relationship between capital, labour and the state on the proper locus of risk and responsibility for worker welfare. Second, labour law, as it developed in both Britain and the colonies excluded large sections of the workforce, often in order to facilitate resource extraction. It narrates the history of employer compensation for silicosis in South Africa and Britain, exposing its contingent, limited coverage and explicit exclusion of Black workers as well as non-industrial workers in fragmented or artisanal production. It uses this insight on exclusion to demonstrate how state compensation in India became possible as a result of lacunae in labour law’s very origins. ‘Informal’ workers, always outside labour law’s ambit, therefore were forced to use the language of rights and the public interest before the Supreme Court of India to advance their demands. This found form in the Public Interest Litigation, a form of legal petition, that variously constructed workers as a community facing unfair working conditions; residents suffering from air pollution; and finally, as victims of a human rights violation. These shifting constructions were played out along the backdrop of advancing marketization in the global political economy, as well as the Supreme Court’s own role in dismantling formal labour law protections at the same time. This thesis situates the development of state compensation for silicosis within these developments, demonstrating that the rise of human rights to advance worker protection was concomitant with a broader assault on the working classes, within which the worker-employer relation has been reconstituted as a citizen-state relation.</p>
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