Climate Change in the Indian Subcontinent: Crises of Social Reproduction under Capitalism

In 2015, the city of Chennai, with a population of population of 12 million suffered one of the worst floods that affected the Coromandel coast of South India. More than 500 people were killed and an estimated 1.8 million people were displaced. Since that time, the city has suffered repeated flooding. Four years later in June 2019, the city declared ‘Day Zero’ as four major reservoirs ‘dried’ up and left four million people reliant on privately purchased water delivered in water tankers. In some cases, the waiting period for a tanker ranged from 15-20 days and consumed a significant portion of household income. 

Chennai is prone to both coastal flooding and recurrent water shortages, both of which have been exacerbated by global climate change. However, climate change is not merely an external phenomenon nor is it sufficient to think of it as resulting from the sum total of all human activity, i.e., a phenomenon of the Anthropocene. Rather, it is a specific outcome of our sociopolitical and economic system of capitalism, which benefits from the exploitation of both nature and workers. In the case of Chennai global capitalist forces have contributed to rapid unplanned urbanization and real estate capitalism. If not compelled by social forces or the directives of the state, capital is prone to ignoring the social reproduction of workers even though it relies on workers for production and surplus generation. 

For the workers, however, total necessary labour constitutes both what capital deems as ‘productive’ labour that generates surplus and is waged as well as ‘reproductive’ nonwaged labour that capital can ignore (Naidu 2025). Conventional economic development in advanced capitalist countries may have created conditions so that nonwaged reproductive labour relies on waged productive labour to engender social reproduction and achieve a minimum standard of living. However, this form of economic development does not represent the trajectory of many Global South economies, and countries in the Global North as well. Both productive and reproductive labour interact with each other in a manner that are co-constituted and are essential for households to achieve socially acceptable levels of consumption They comprise the ‘labours of social reproduction’ (see figure).

These labours of social reproduction are subject to capitalist expropriation, exploitation, and the oppressions under capitalism. The compulsion to reach socially acceptable levels of consumption may lengthen the total workday and may thus cause of a crisis for working people that are spatially, temporally and historically contingent. However, if the lengthening of the workday still does not allow working people to reach acceptable consumption levels and falls below minimum levels of consumption, that constitutes an acute crisis of social reproduction (Naidu 2023). 

Figure: Labours in the Circuits of Social Reproduction 

Source: Naidu (2023) 

In India, for instance, only 21 percent of India’s total workforce in 2022-23 was employed as regular wage or salaried workers, whereas 22 percent were casual wage workers, the remaining were non-waged workers (18 percent were unpaid family workers, and the rest were own account workers and employers) (MOSPI 2024). Most of the wage work, i.e., regular or casual wage work is of low quality so that atleast 70 percent of these workers were without benefits such as job stability, social security benefits or paid leave (MoSPI 2024). Fifty-seven percent of the remaining workforce engaged in nonwaged work were excluded from all work-related benefits. These official Indian statistics though exclude the bulk of women’s efforts in producing subsistence goods and services and even their contributions to many market-related activities. Rather such production is invisibilized as unproductive and uneconomic. Capital benefits from the separating the analysis of production from social reproduction.

The role of nature in social reproduction of the working people is also obscured under capitalism. Data from 1983 to 2011 suggest that floods have long-term effects on employment for both men and women workers, the former are better positioned to shift into agricultural employment whereas the latter are left with fewer options (Chowdhury, Parida and Agarwal 2022). This is significant given that more than 90 percent of women workers in India are employed in agriculture and allied activities.  

Capitalist accumulation, further, impinges on the ability to engage in social reproduction when it reduces access to the natural commons that allow nonwaged labour to produce goods and services for household consumption or for sale in the market. This impingement can be through appropriation, environmental degradation, or impacts on climate change. 

There may be decreased availability of freely available goods and services available from nature thus reducing consumption levels as in the case of water shortages in 2019 in Chennai. Both water shortages and flooding may also increase time expenditure associated with domestic production and care labour either due to lower health outcomes or queuing up for water at community taps, handpumps, and tankers, i.e., the compulsion to maintain minimum consumption levels. Women are not exempt from cooking or cleaning or caring for children during times of flooding or water shortages. 

In times of disasters like flooding, economically and socially marginalized women in India are highly vulnerable because of their socioeconomic status, gendered social norms and hazardous spaces that live and work in (Mehzabeen 2023; Singh 2020). These gendered effects may be exacerbated by their caste, religion, and immigration status. 

The water crises associated with flooding and shortages may lengthen the total workday for the working classes and constitute a struggle to achieve the socially acceptable level of consumption thus representing a crisis of social reproduction. For many households a longer workday may still lead to underconsumption and threaten survival, thus representing an acute crisis of social reproduction. 

The ecology of capitalism represents crises for the working classes imposed by and within capitalism. Struggles for social reproduction then are not divorced from class struggles but constitute an integral part of the struggle for life and dignity. 

Sirisha Naidu is an Associate Professor of Economics and affiliate faculty in the Department of Race, Ethnic, and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). Her research focuses on feminist political economy analyses of agrarian change and ecological shifts, environmental justice, the interwoven tapestry of productive and reproductive labor in the Global South, and informal and precarious work in the global economy.

References

Chowdhury, J.R., Parida, Y., & Agarwal, P. (2022). How flood affects rural employment in India: A gender analysis, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 73. 

Mehzabeen, E. (2023). Living a flooded life: women, city and community in North East India's Dibrugarh. Journal of North East India Studies, 13(1): 50-70.

MoSPI (2024) INDIA - Periodic labour force survey (PLFS). Government of India, https://microdata.gov.in/nada43/index.php/catalog/210/related_materials.

Naidu, S.C. 2023. Circuits of social reproduction: nature, labor and capitalism. Review of Radical Political Economics, 55(1), 93-111.

Naidu, S.C. (2025) How (un)productive is reproductive labor? feminist political economists on the household economy under capitalism. In A. Bernasek and L. Chester (Eds.) The Edward Elgar Handbook of Women and Heterodox Economics: Past, Present, And Future. Edward Elgar.

Singh, D. (2020). Gender relations, urban flooding, and the lived experiences of women in informal urban spaces. Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 26(3), 326–346.