Abstract
This paper analyses the nature and increasing precarity of India’s employment in the last decade and a half. It examines the trends in informal employment in India in 2004–05, 2011–12 and 2017–18. The analysis reveals that there has been a significant degree of informalisation of employment in the formal sector of the economy, and among regular/salaried workers, who form the predominant section of the formal sector workforce. This has counteracted the potentially positive effect of the economy-wide shift from agricultural to non-agricultural employment, towards regular/salaried work and towards formal sector growth. This result reflects on the long-standing debate in India on the impact of formal labour relations on the formal sector employment. Formal employment is considered to be associated with very rigid labour laws restricting hiring and firing of workers. However, the paper shows that formal sector employment has expanded but with much greater informality of employment. This situation demands urgent attention in order to reverse the increasing precariousness of employment and engage policy levers in reducing the growing labour market inequalities in India.
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Notes
- 1.
Kalleberg and Vallas (2018) define precarious work as “work that is uncertain, unstable, and insecure and in which employees bear the risks of work (as opposed to businesses or the government) and receive limited social benefits and statutory protections” (p. 1). ILO (2011) further adds that precarious work is “usually defined by uncertainty as to the duration of employment, multiple possible employers or a disguised or ambiguous employment relationship, a lack of access to social protection and benefits usually associated with employment, low pay, and substantial legal and practical obstacles to joining a trade union and bargaining collectively”.
- 2.
See ILO (2013). According to paragraph 3(5) of the 17th ICLS guidelines, employees are considered to have informal jobs if their employment relationship is, in law or in practice, not subject to national labour legislation, income taxation, social protection or entitlement to certain employment benefits (advance notice of dismissal, severance pay, paid annual or sick leave, etc.) for reasons such as: the jobs or the employees are not declared to the relevant authorities; the jobs are casual or of a limited duration (e.g. through on-call arrangements); the hours of work or wages are below a specified threshold (e.g. below that qualifying for social security contributions); the workers are employed by unincorporated enterprises or by persons in households; the employee’s place of work is outside the premises of the employer’s enterprise (e.g. outworkers without an employment contract); or regulations are not applied, not enforced or not complied with for any reason (ibid. p. 39).
- 3.
For the computation of census adjusted population figures, we have used the recent Census India (2019) projected population estimates for the year 2011–12 and 2017–18. See for details, Census of India 2011 Population Projections for India and States 2011–2036 Report of The Technical Group on Population Projections November, 2019.
- 4.
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Srivastava, R., Padhi, B., Ranjan, R. (2020). Structural Change and Increasing Precarity of Employment in India. In: Mishra, N.K. (eds) Development Challenges of India After Twenty Five Years of Economic Reforms. India Studies in Business and Economics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8265-3_8
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