WOMEN WORKERS AND DEVELOPMENT 5 and nowhere as fast as the increase in the supply of labour. Indians population of working age increased by about 51 millions between 1961 and 1971. In the period between 1962 to 1971, only 6.4 million additional jobs were created in the organised sector2 which meant that the overwhelming majority had to find a living outside the organised sector. (2) Because such gainful employment is increasing slowly, the bargaining position of the people already so employed has become considerably weaker. Their claims for wage increases even to keep up with the inflationary price rise are no longer successful.8 Even politicians have taken to advising them that they should share their good luck with other less fortunate people and not go in for '^narrow economism.'9 (3) Traditional industries like textiles which once employed a proportionately large number of workers,, have now started to modernise on grounds that they have to increase their competitiveness in the world market. For this modernisation, they have received substantial public assistance. This modernisation, however., mainly consists of further mechanisation with the result that in industries like the cotton and jute textiles, employment went down in absolute numbers between 1966 and 1970.4 India's planned development has thus been based on the implicit assumption that a large section of the working population is superfluous. From the Second Plan onwards, when planning on these assumptions started, it has been very glibly accepted that these people will find employment in consumer goods industries which were expected to adopt labour intensive techniques, but nothing was done to ensure that demand for their products would expand sufficiently to absorb all this available labour at wages which can provide a living to the workers involved. Rather, as we saw above, a number of industries like textiles were encouraged to adopt capital intensive techniques on grounds of interna-nationAl marketability. The actual people who have been left out, however, cannot just sit idle like lumps of unmined COJ.L They have to find a living somehow or the other. They usually do so by depressing the supply pi ice of their labour, often to levels below subsistence. It is only in the modern sector that workers had managed to get a living wage for themselves and that too is being fast eroded over time. An Anomaly Obviously^ a situation where some 200 million Indians are being made to work under such conditions and have no immediate prospect of any change for the better is potentially a highly explosive one. In the classical logic, it should, in the long-run lead to the operation ofMalthu-sian checks whose indications should by now start becoming obvious. There is, however, no sign of this happening. Population experts do not find any immediate prospect of a fall'in the feitility rates or rise in the death rate.8