Road Construction, Dependency, and Exploitation in Ladakh, North India

Jonathan Demenge

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DOI: 10.2190/WR.15.3-4.e

Abstract

This article explores the politics of road construction and its effects on migrant workers in Ladakh, North India. The Zanskar Highway, a 292-kilometer-long trans-Himalayan road that has been under construction since 1971, provides employment to more than 1,200 seasonal and permanent road builders and their families. It is being built by the Border Roads Organisation, a public company that recently made the headlines for its abysmal treatment of workers, labor rights violations, and high fatality rate. Through an ethnography of road builders and their families, I document their situation and their particular relationship to death and danger. I attempt to assess the effects of road construction on workers' livelihoods and well-being, and point to a paradox: whereas labor-intensive methods are devised to generate employment and benefit workers, institutional mechanisms maintain workers in a situation of dependency and exploitation. The article identifies these mechanisms and suggests some potential solutions.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.