Trends in employment and unemployment in India, as presented by the quinquennial surveys of the National Sample Survey Office for the past decades, have raised many questions for which there are no easy answers. This paper attempts to address some missing links. With the help of time use statistics, it argues that the missing labour force does not imply withdrawal of women (and maybe some men) from the labour market. A large part of the missing labour is missing only from the NSSO data but is very much there in the labour force - though a small part may be due to withdrawal.

Unless the problems of exploitation and oppression of workers are addressed, labour unrest will continue to spread. (Editorial)

The events of 18 July in the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki which ended with the murder of a company manager were not a sudden confl agration. Anger at the plant had been building up for months over the management's refusal to recognise an elected union; workers were increasingly frustrated over their inability to exercise their constitutional rights and the demand of equal pay for equal work was falling on deaf ears.

Landless dalits and adivasis have occupied parts of a corporate rubber plantation at Chengara in Kerala for five years. Despite being pressurised in various ways, they have held out, sticking to their demand of land for them to pursue livelihoods. None of the agreements so far reached with the state government has been satisfactorily implemented. Yet, the issues raised by the Chengara struggle have a social and economic significance that no government can afford to ignore.

Recent decades of globalisation provide a new starting point for the study of south Asia by highlighting critical human issues that force history into the present and generate new productive conversations between history and social science. One fundamental issue is the increasing inequality in wealth and control over human resources, globally and in south Asia. Economic policy regimes in the contemporary world resemble those of laissez-faire imperalism of a century ago more than national state planning regimes that prevailed from the 1950s into the 1980s.