Kolar Gold Fields, Deindustrialized, 2019

Overview
Until 2001, Kolar Gold Fields – the eponymous township within Kolar district, Karnataka, India – was inhabited primarily by two, strictly and institutionally differentiated groups of workers of the central government-led Bharat Gold Mines Limited – managers and mine workers. In the years hence, following mine closure and state withdrawal from welfare provision, this differentiation – between manager and worker – was reified as managers and their families migrated away from the township while workers and their families endured. What remained was a township firmly in the Global South yet in conversation with the poverty and blight of deindustrialized cities in the Global North - Youngstown, Detroit or Flint.

My ethnographic interview and survey research in Kolar Gold Fields comparatively explored economic decline and poverty in the area, in concert with deindustrialization in the Global North. I focalize differences in cyclic urban migration patterns and proximate agglomeration – Bengaluru is nearly 96 km or 60 mi away – as altering the character of blight and poverty in the region, and tempering economic adversity in the area. I identify possible interventions addressing poverty in Kolar Gold Fields, exploiting these aspects of migration and agglomeration, including the development of industries and training mechanisms closely allied with needs in Bengaluru. Interventions identified as part of this research project have been implemented by the Mathew and Ghosh SustainableCreationCare Foundation, wherein women from Kolar Gold Fields are trained in sewing and embroidery using textile waste. 

Funding for this project was enabled through my receipt of grants from the Kelter Urban Studies Endowment Fund and the Grossman Global Studies Fund.