Assistant Professor,
School of Liberal Studies
Rinju Rasaily has done her M.A. (Sociology) and PhD (Social Medicine and Community Health) from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her thesis entitled “Labour and Health in Tea Plantations: A case study of Phuguri Tea Estate, Darjeeling” examined the social aetiology of health and working conditions of tea plantation labour. She works on questions of labour with a focus on plantation labour, workers’ health, exclusion based on identities and issues of livelihood and development. She has extensively worked on labour in the tea plantation sector and also has taken keen interest in studying labour history and issues around social exclusion of the labouring poor along the markers of caste, ethnicity and gender. She was also engaged in research on occupational safety and health of workers in the manufacturing sector in Delhi and in understanding labour relations and organising activities in the brick kiln sector in Punjab. Currently she is engaged in a research study with V.V.Giri National Labour Institute on “Family labour in the small holding plantation sector in South India”.
She was a faculty member at V. V. Giri National Labour Institute, (Ministry of Labour and Employment, GOI), NOIDA from December 2010-July 2014. She has also worked with the non-government sector with organisations like PRIA, Centre for Education and Communication (CEC) and SAMA- Resource Group for Women and Health in Delhi for over six years.
She has been a member of a sub-group on ‘Policy Recommendations for the Tea Plantations Sector workers’ at the National Advisory Council (NAC), GOI, 2013. She was also the Member-Convener- National Sectoral Innovation Council on Occupational Safety and Health (NSIC-OSH), GOI, 2013 while at VVGNLI. She recently presented a paper on ‘Hierarchies at Work and Health: Case of the Tea Plantation sector in Darjeeling” at the British Sociological Association’s (BSA) Conference on Work in Crisis held at Leeds Business School, University of Leeds, U.K. 5-8th September 2016 and a paper on “Changing forms of collectivisation in the tea plantation sector: Case of North Bengal” at Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata; Conference on Negotiating Globalisation, Trade Unions and Labour in Contemporary India, September 22-23, 2016, Kolkata.