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ImpactMojo 101 Series · Free Forever · May Day 2026
Work,
Labour &
Livelihoods
101
A Working Practitioner's Field Guide to How Indians Make a Living — Frameworks, Data, Law, and the Politics of Work
May Day Edition South Asia Focus 100 Slides Free Access
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Agenda
What We Cover in 100 Slides
01
What Counts as Work
Slides 3–8
02
The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework
Slides 9–16
03
Rural Livelihoods in India
Slides 17–25
04
The Indian Labour Market: A Map
Slides 26–33
05
Informal Work — Where Most Indians Are
Slides 34–41
06
Wages, Inequality & Penalties
Slides 42–49
07
Labour Law & the 2019–20 Codes
Slides 50–58
08
Social Protection & Worker Welfare
Slides 59–66
09
Gig, Platform & Future of Work
Slides 67–74
10
Trade Unions & Worker Organising
Slides 75–82
11
Climate, Migration & Work in Transition
Slides 83–91
12
Further Reading & Glossary
Slides 92–100
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01
Section One
What Counts as Work
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Section 01 · The Definition Question
Work Is More Than Employment
Most policy conversations conflate “work” with “paid employment.” The actual category is wider. The 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (2013) defined work as any activity performed by persons of any sex and age to produce goods or to provide services for use by others or for own use.
  • Employment work — for pay or profit
  • Own-use production work — subsistence, household production
  • Volunteer work — unpaid services for others
  • Unpaid trainee work — for skill acquisition
  • Other forms — including unpaid care
Work (ICLS-19, 2013)
Any activity performed by persons of any sex and age to produce goods or to provide services for use by others or for own use. The definition recognises five forms of work; only one of them — employment work — is what national income accounts and most labour statistics actually measure.
Why this matters: if “work” means only paid employment, half of what Indians actually do every day — subsistence farming, household production, care, community labour — disappears from the policy frame. The definition is not just academic; it determines what gets counted, valued, and protected.
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Section 01 · The SNA Boundary
What GDP Counts — and What It Doesn't
The System of National Accounts (SNA) draws a production boundary that determines what enters GDP. Subsistence agriculture and own-account housing construction are inside. Unpaid domestic work and care for household members are outside. The line is not natural; it is a convention with consequences.
  • Inside SNA boundary: goods produced for own use, market production, government services, NPISH activities
  • Inside SNA but typically poorly measured: own-account farming, NTFP collection, home-based manufacturing
  • Outside SNA but inside “general production boundary”: unpaid domestic services, care for household members
  • Wholly outside: leisure, voluntary self-care
Time-use evidence from India
India's first national Time Use Survey (NSO 2019) found women aged 15+ spent on average ~299 minutes per day on unpaid domestic services for household members; men spent ~97 minutes. On unpaid caregiving for household members, women spent ~134 minutes per day; men ~76. None of this enters GDP. None of it shows up as “employment.”
Indira Hirway's long campaign for time-use data in India produced this 2019 survey. The 2024 round repeated the exercise. The data is now there for policymakers who want to see what they have been missing.
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Section 01 · The Care Economy
Care Work — Indispensable, Largely Unpaid, Mostly Female
  • ILO 2018 estimate: globally, 16.4 billion hours per day spent on unpaid care work — equivalent to 2 billion full-time workers
  • Women perform roughly 3 of every 4 hours of unpaid care globally; in India closer to 7 of every 8
  • If valued at minimum wage, unpaid care would equal ~9% of global GDP
  • The Indian time-use 2019 valuation exercises put unpaid care in India at 7.5–15.4% of GDP depending on method
  • Paid care work (anganwadi workers, ASHAs, domestic workers, nurses) is also undervalued and largely female
Why care matters for any work analysis
Without unpaid care, no one shows up to paid work the next day. Care reproduces the labour force. Treating it as a residual rather than as foundational distorts every downstream analysis — FLFP estimates, wage-gap calculations, productivity comparisons. Care also disproportionately constrains who can take which jobs at which wages, with major implications for women's labour-market participation in India.
Naila Kabeer, Devaki Jain, Bina Agarwal, Indira Hirway, and Jayati Ghosh have written extensively on the care economy in South Asia. The Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University is the current institutional anchor.
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Section 01 · A Working Map
How Work Is Organised in India — A Stack
Layer 01
Formal Employment
Written contracts, regular wages, social security coverage (EPFO, ESIC), labour law applies. ~10% of total Indian workforce. Concentrated in central government, PSUs, large private firms, and parts of organised manufacturing/services.
Layer 02
Informal Wage Employment
Wage work without written contract or full social security. Construction labour, domestic workers, contract workers in factories, small-shop staff, transport workers. Roughly half of all wage employment.
Layer 03
Self-employment
Own-account workers, employers, unpaid family helpers. ~50–55% of workforce. Includes farmers, street vendors, home-based producers, small shopkeepers, autorickshaw drivers, freelancers. Wide income range.
The 90/10 reality: roughly 90% of Indian workers are in informal employment of one kind or another — either informal wage workers or own-account/self-employed. Formal employment with full benefits is a minority condition. Any policy that addresses only the 10% misses the structure of Indian work.
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A Framing for the Field
"The labour of women and men in the household is real work. The labour of the small farmer growing food for her own family is real work. The labour of the casual labourer who waits at the chowk for a day's wage is real work. Our statistics, our laws, and our protections must learn to recognise this."
— Ela Bhatt · founder, Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) · consistent argument across her writings, 1972–2022
For development practitioners: the first decision in any livelihoods or labour project is whose work counts. Defining the unit of analysis — household, individual, enterprise, value chain — determines what you see and what your intervention will do.
For economists and lawyers: the gap between “the labour market” as it appears in textbooks and as Indian workers actually experience it is the gap between formal employment models and a 90% informal reality. The frameworks must adapt; the reality will not.
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02
Section Two
The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework
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Section 02 · Where the Framework Came From
Chambers, Conway & the SLF
The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework grew out of work at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) Brighton in the late 1980s. Robert Chambers and Gordon Conway's 1991 paper, “Sustainable Rural Livelihoods,” gave the field its working definition. The framework was operationalised by DFID in the late 1990s as the SLF and used widely by NGOs, donors, and ministries.
"A livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living."
— Chambers & Conway · IDS Discussion Paper 296 · 1991
Why this framing was a shift
  • Earlier rural development work focused on production (yields, output)
  • SLF moved attention to households and how they make a living overall
  • Recognised multiple income sources, including non-farm
  • Centred capabilities and agency, drawing on Sen
  • Took risk and vulnerability as foundational, not residual
  • Treated sustainability as livelihood-level, not just ecological
Ian Scoones's 1998 paper, “Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: A Framework for Analysis,” refined the SLF and remains the most widely cited operational version.
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Section 02 · The Standard Diagram
The DFID SLF — Five Capitals, Vulnerability Context, Outcomes
01
Vulnerability
Context
(shocks, trends, seasonality)
→
02
Livelihood
Assets
(five capitals)
→
03
Transforming
Structures
(institutions, policies)
04
Livelihood
Strategies
(NR-based, off-farm, migration)
→
05
Livelihood
Outcomes
(income, well-being, food security, resilience)
How to read this: a household holds a portfolio of five capitals (next slide). Shocks and seasonality affect what they have. Institutions and policies mediate access. Households then deploy assets through strategies to produce outcomes — which feed back into asset stocks for the next cycle. The framework is iterative, household-centred, and risk-aware.
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Section 02 · The Asset Pentagon
The Five Capitals
Human Capital
Skills, knowledge, ability to labour
Education levels, vocational training, health status, nutritional adequacy, ability to perform labour. Erodes with illness, disability, ageing.
Natural Capital
Land, water, forests, biodiversity
Owned, rented, or accessed common-property resources. Includes soil quality, irrigation access, NTFP availability, fisheries, grazing land.
Physical Capital
Tools, infrastructure, productive assets
Equipment, livestock, housing, transport, irrigation infrastructure, electricity, road access, market access, communications.
Financial Capital
Cash, savings, credit access
Liquid savings, credit access (formal and informal), regular income flows (remittances, pensions, NREGA wages), insurance.
Social Capital
Networks, trust, group membership
Family, kin, caste, community ties; SHG/cooperative membership; political connections. Determines who can call on whom under stress.
A sixth: Political Capital
added by later versions
Voice, agency, ability to shape rules. Some authors (Baumann, Sinha) added this as a sixth dimension to capture who can change the structures, not just navigate them.
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Section 02 · Vulnerability Context
Shocks, Trends & Seasonality
The vulnerability context is the external environment of risks, trends, and seasonal patterns over which households have limited control. Treating these as foundational, not residual, was one of the SLF's most useful moves — it made risk an everyday variable, not an emergency category.
  • Shocks — drought, flood, illness in family, death, loss of job, conflict, market collapse
  • Trends — demographic, technological, market, climate, governance shifts over years and decades
  • Seasonality — agricultural calendar, monsoon, school calendar, festival economy, lean-season migration
Why seasonality is foundational in India
For roughly half the rural workforce, agricultural labour demand swings sharply between peak (transplanting, harvest) and lean (April–June, October–November) seasons. The lean-season distress migration of 100+ million circular migrants is largely driven by this pattern. Designing year-round livelihoods means understanding the agrarian calendar.
SoWI 2023 (Azim Premji University) and the ICRISAT VLS dataset are essential for understanding seasonal labour-market dynamics in semi-arid India.
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Section 02 · What Households Do With Assets
Livelihood Strategies & Outcomes
Three broad strategies (Scoones 1998)
  • Agricultural intensification/extensification — more output from existing or expanded land
  • Livelihood diversification — spreading risk across multiple income sources, including off-farm and non-farm
  • Migration — temporary, seasonal, or permanent movement to other places for work
The Indian rural household typically combines all three: a small farm worked by the elders, with adult children migrating seasonally, supplemented by NREGA wages and small livestock. Pure single-strategy households are rare.
Livelihood outcomes — what we measure
  • Income — total household income; per-capita; wage vs non-wage
  • Well-being — subjective and multidimensional (Sen, Alkire)
  • Food security — access, availability, utilisation, stability
  • Reduced vulnerability — resilience to specific shocks
  • Sustainable use of natural resources — maintaining the asset base
  • Capability expansion — choices and freedoms
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Section 02 · Honest Critiques
What the Framework Misses
  • Power and politics — Scoones's own 2009 critique: the SLF tends to depoliticise. Who controls institutions? Who sets the rules?
  • Class — Bernstein and others argue the household focus obscures class relations between agrarian classes
  • Globalisation — the framework was built for villages; the actual lives of rural households are tied to global commodity prices, migrant remittances, and cross-border value chains
  • Gender — treating “the household” as a unit hides intra-household inequality, especially gendered control over assets
  • Caste — the framework imported uncritically into India often missed how caste structures access to every capital
  • Operational complexity — full SLF analysis is expensive; in practice, many projects use it as a checklist
Where the framework remains useful
  • For programme design, particularly for diagnosing why a single intervention may not work
  • For evaluating shocks (drought, lockdown) and their differential household-level impact
  • For thinking about asset accumulation as the path out of poverty, not income alone
  • For grounding any livelihoods conversation in actual household trade-offs
  • For pushing back against single-sector programme designs that ignore the portfolio
Read the SLF as one good lens among several — not as a complete theory.
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A Framing on Livelihoods Thinking
"Rural people manage their assets, activities and entitlements within a vulnerability context shaped by trends, shocks and seasonality. Programme design that ignores this context, or treats vulnerability as exception rather than rule, will fail in predictable ways."
— a working synthesis of Chambers, Scoones & subsequent SLF practice · ImpactMojo, 2026
For programme designers: if your project addresses only one capital (more credit, more training, more land), but the binding constraint sits elsewhere, the project will not deliver. The framework is a diagnostic discipline before it is anything else.
For evaluators: the SLF gives a structured way to ask whether outcomes have improved without the asset base being depleted. A “successful” intervention that runs down natural or social capital is not actually successful.
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03
Section Three
Rural Livelihoods in India
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Section 03 · The Rural Picture
Rural India Today — Some Numbers
~65%
share of population still rural (Census 2011; 2023–24 PLFS estimates similar; pending 2021 Census update)
~46%
share of total workforce in agriculture and allied sectors (PLFS 2022–23) — rose during pandemic, only partially reversed
~18%
agriculture and allied share of GVA at current prices (Economic Survey 2023–24) — the wage-output mismatch in one number
86%
share of operational holdings classified as small or marginal (less than 2 hectares) per Agriculture Census 2015–16; share has only risen since
  • Average operational holding size has fallen below 1.1 hectares
  • Half of all rural households rely on agriculture as primary livelihood
  • Most farming households also derive income from labour, livestock, NTFP, and migration
  • Average agricultural household monthly income (2018–19 NSS): ~₹10,218; about half from cultivation, half from wages, livestock, and non-farm
  • Net farm investment per hectare has stagnated; debt levels have risen
The empirical anchor: NABARD All-India Rural Financial Inclusion Survey (NAFIS) 2016–17 and 2021–22; NSS Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households 2018–19; PLFS rural rounds.
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Section 03 · The Agrarian Question
Agrarian Distress — Components and Causes
  • Falling land sizes — sub-division below economically viable scale
  • Input cost inflation outpacing output price growth in many crops
  • Yield plateaus in major crops, especially under monsoon variability
  • Debt accumulation — NSS 2019: 50.2% of agricultural households indebted; average outstanding debt ₹74,121
  • Climate stress — erratic monsoons, heat events, groundwater depletion
  • Market access constraints for small farmers, especially without FPO membership
  • Public investment in agriculture below 2% of agri-GVA in recent years
Farmer suicides — the visible tip
  • NCRB has recorded ~10,000+ farmer/farm-labourer suicides per year through the 2010s
  • Concentrated in Maharashtra, Telangana, Karnataka, MP — cotton-growing rain-fed regions
  • Suicides correlate strongly with debt, crop failure, and household-level shocks (P. Sainath; M.S. Swaminathan Foundation work)
  • Compensation mechanisms remain inadequate and unevenly applied
P. Sainath's reporting through PARI, M.S. Swaminathan's 2004–06 National Commission on Farmers, and Vandana Soni's work with rural communities have anchored the practitioner literature.
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Section 03 · The Wage Floor
MGNREGA — The Largest Employment Programme in History
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, provides a legal guarantee of 100 days of unskilled wage employment per rural household per year, on demand, at the notified state minimum wage. It is the largest workfare programme ever implemented and a foundational element of rural livelihoods.
  • ~7–10 crore households employed each year, depending on demand
  • ~250–300 crore person-days of work generated annually
  • Asset creation: water harvesting, land development, rural connectivity, plantations
  • Wage rates notified separately by state; range ~₹230–₹370 per day in 2024–25
  • Women's share of person-days has risen above 55% in many states
What the evidence shows
  • Wage floor effects in rural labour markets, especially for women (Imbert & Papp 2015; Berg et al 2018)
  • Reduced distress migration in some intensive-MGNREGA districts
  • Improved consumption smoothing for SC/ST households disproportionately
  • Implementation quality varies sharply across states
  • Wage delays and underprovisioning are persistent issues
  • Budget allocations have not kept pace with the legal entitlement
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Section 03 · Common-Property Resources
NTFP, Commons & Forest-Dependent Livelihoods
An estimated 275 million Indians depend on forests and common-property resources for some part of their livelihood. Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) — mahua, tendu leaves, sal seeds, lac, gum, honey, bamboo, medicinal plants — remain central for tribal and forest-fringe communities.
  • Forest Rights Act, 2006: recognised individual and community forest rights for tribal and other traditional forest-dwellers
  • Implementation uneven; many community claims pending or rejected
  • Minor Forest Produce MSP scheme (2013–) for tendu, mahua, kendu, sal, etc.
  • State Tribal Cooperative Marketing Federation networks
  • TRIFED's Van Dhan Vikas Yojana (2018–) aggregating tribal NTFP collectors
Common-property economics
N.S. Jodha's landmark work in the 1980s documented how CPRs contribute 15–25% of household income in rain-fed semi-arid villages, with the share rising to 30%+ for the poorest households. Privatisation and encroachment of commons therefore falls hardest on those least able to absorb the loss. Elinor Ostrom's framework on governing the commons applies directly — effective community institutions exist where the rules emerge from users themselves.
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Section 03 · Migration as Livelihood
Internal Migration in India
  • 2011 Census: ~450 million internal migrants (most for marriage; ~100 million primarily for work)
  • Working Group on Migration (2017) estimated ~100 million circular labour migrants
  • Major flows: Bihar, UP, Odisha, Jharkhand, MP, West Bengal → Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Bengaluru
  • Construction, brick kilns, agriculture (transplanting, harvesting), domestic work, security, hospitality — major absorbing sectors
  • 2020 reverse migration: an estimated 30+ million workers returned to home districts during the COVID lockdown
Key references
  • Ravi Srivastava — sustained scholarly mapping of internal migration patterns
  • Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, 1979 — mostly unimplemented
  • e-Shram registry (2021–) — ~30 crore registrations, but portability of benefits limited
  • One Nation One Ration Card — partial fix on PDS portability
  • Aajeevika Bureau (Rajasthan) — long-running migration practice work
  • Migration Story (PARI, India Migration Now) — current journalism and research
The political economy of Indian migration: workers move; entitlements (PDS, schools, hospitals) remain anchored to home districts. Designing portable social protection is the binding policy challenge.
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Section 03 · The Non-Farm Economy
Rural Non-Farm Employment — the Diversification Story
Rural India is not synonymous with agriculture. The non-farm rural economy — small manufacturing, services, trade, construction, transport — absorbs a growing share of rural workers, especially men. The pattern is uneven: distress diversification (workers pushed off agriculture by low returns) coexists with productive diversification (workers pulled into higher-return non-farm activities).
  • Non-farm share of rural workforce rose from ~25% in 1993–94 to ~45% by 2019–20
  • Construction is the single largest non-farm sector for rural men
  • Manufacturing share has stagnated at ~8% of rural employment
  • Services growth concentrated in trade, transport, and hospitality
  • COVID partially reversed the structural shift
Distress vs productive diversification
Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava and others have argued that much rural non-farm employment in India is distress-driven — low-productivity casual labour rather than dynamic small enterprise. Bhaskar Dutta and others find pockets of productive diversification, especially around larger towns. The mix matters for policy: skills training works for the productive segment, but cannot substitute for floor-level wage protection in distress segments.
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Section 03 · The Aggregation Architecture
SHGs, FPOs & the NRLM Architecture
  • SHGs (Self-Help Groups) — ~14 lakh active SHG-bank linkages with savings and credit; ~9 crore women members through NRLM
  • NRLM (DAY-NRLM) — National Rural Livelihoods Mission, 2011–; flagship rural poverty programme using SHG federation architecture
  • FPOs (Farmer Producer Organisations) — promoted under SFAC, NABARD; aim to aggregate small farmer market power
  • 10,000 FPO scheme (2020–) targeting formation/strengthening with public funding
  • Cooperatives — older institutional form; mixed performance; AMUL/dairy cooperatives are global model cases
  • Producer companies under Companies Act amendments (2002–) — legal form combining cooperative spirit with corporate governance
What SHGs and FPOs do well, and don't
SHGs have been a major positive force for women's mobility, savings, and limited credit access; their record on livelihood incomes is more mixed. FPOs have shown promise in horticulture, dairy, and specific value chains; many remain financially fragile. Both are useful institutions but neither substitutes for the missing pieces — market infrastructure, working capital, and the broader regulatory environment.
PRADAN, BASIX, Aga Khan Rural Support Programme, and SEWA have produced the longest-running practice base for SHG/FPO design.
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A Framing on Rural Livelihoods
"Whose reality counts? Whose voice is heard? Whose categories are used? In rural development, the answers determine what gets done. The poor live diversified, risk-managed, asset-portfolio lives. Programmes built on simpler models systematically fail them."
— a working synthesis from Robert Chambers' Whose Reality Counts? (1997) and forty years of IDS Brighton scholarship
For practitioners working in rural India: the unit of design is the household, not the individual; the time horizon is multi-year, not project-cycle; and the strategy is portfolio diversification, not single-sector intensification. Match the programme to the actual household decision space.
For policy: agricultural growth alone will not absorb rural workforce growth. Non-farm employment, MGNREGA wage floor, labour-mobility infrastructure, and portable social protection are the four legs that have to work together.
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04
Section Four
The Indian Labour Market: A Map
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Section 04 · The Working Definitions
LFPR, WPR, UR — the Working Vocabulary
IndicatorWhat it measuresNumerator / Denominator
LFPR · Labour Force Participation RateShare of working-age population in the labour force (employed + actively seeking)(Employed + Unemployed) / Working-age population
WPR · Worker Population RatioShare of working-age population that is employedEmployed / Working-age population
UR · Unemployment RateShare of labour force that is unemployed and seeking workUnemployed / Labour force
Usual Status (PS+SS)Status over the past 365 days — principal + subsidiaryThe standard PLFS reference period for annual estimates
Current Weekly StatusStatus during the seven days preceding the surveyCaptures more transient/seasonal work
Two source caveats: PLFS (NSSO) and CMIE produce different unemployment numbers because they use different definitions and survey designs. PLFS is the official series; CMIE is more frequent. Read both, understand the methodology, and report the source.
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Section 04 · Topline Numbers
The Indian Labour Market — PLFS 2022–23
~57.9%
All-India LFPR (usual status, age 15+) per PLFS 2022–23
~56.0%
All-India WPR — the share of working-age population in any work
~3.2%
All-India unemployment rate (PLFS); >7–8% for urban youth and graduates
~37%
Female LFPR (PLFS 2022–23) — recovered from 2017–18 lows but well below male LFPR ~78%
The reading order: low official unemployment plus low LFPR is not good news. It means people are not recorded as unemployed because they are not actively seeking work — often because there is no work to seek, or because care responsibilities and social norms keep them out. The unemployment rate alone tells you very little.
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Section 04 · The FLFP Puzzle
Female Labour Force Participation in India
India female LFPR (age 15+, usual status PS+SS) · PLFS / NSSO EUS
Source: NSSO Employment-Unemployment Surveys 2004–05 to 2011–12; PLFS 2017–18 onwards. Note 2017–18 break in series with PLFS introduction.
  • Female LFPR fell from ~33% (2004–05) to ~24% (2017–18) before recovering
  • Recovery to ~37% by 2022–23 reflects measurement changes and rural distress (women returning to family farms)
  • Among the lowest FLFP rates in the world for a country at India's income level
  • Urban FLFP ~25%; rural ~42% — rural higher because of unpaid family farm work being captured
  • The gap with men (~40 percentage points) is among the widest internationally
Reading: Sonalde Desai, Ashwini Deshpande, Jayati Ghosh, Rohini Pande, Charmi Mehta, Ahmed & Mehrotra. The puzzle has multiple explanations — income effects, social norms, demand-side, measurement — that interact rather than substitute.
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Section 04 · Why FLFP Matters
The FLFP Puzzle — Multiple Explanations
  • Income effect / Sanskritisation — as household income rises, women withdraw from agricultural labour as a status signal; documented but contested
  • Care burden — women carry 7× the unpaid care load of men; constrains paid work participation
  • Norms — restrictions on female mobility, especially after marriage; varies by region, caste, religion
  • Demand-side — structural shift away from agriculture and home-based work; non-farm jobs not absorbing women at the same rate
  • Education paradox — rising education without proportionate job availability for educated women
  • Measurement — surveys may under-count subsidiary and seasonal work performed by women
Why this matters economically
McKinsey Global Institute (2018) and ILO have estimated that closing India's gender employment gap could add 18–27% to GDP by 2030. The estimate methodology is debatable; the order of magnitude tells you the prize. India is leaving a major share of its productive potential on the table.
Designing for FLFP is not a women's issue separate from labour policy; it is the central labour-policy question. Care infrastructure, safe transport, anti-harassment enforcement, and demand-side job creation all bear on it.
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Section 04 · The Three Cuts
Formal/Informal · Organised/Unorganised — the Distinctions
DistinctionWhat separatesIndian numbers
Organised vs UnorganisedEnterprise-level: organised = 10+ workers (with power) or 20+ (without), under Factories Act etc.; unorganised = below threshold~7% of workforce in organised sector enterprises
Formal vs Informal employmentWorker-level: formal = written contract + social security; informal = neither or one missing~10% of total workforce in formal employment (ILO/NCEUS framework)
Wage vs Self-employmentWage = paid by an employer; self-employment = own-account, employer, or unpaid family helper~50–55% self-employed; ~25% regular wage; ~20–25% casual wage (PLFS)
Public vs PrivateGovernment, PSU, departmental vs private sector~3% of workforce in central+state government; ~5% in PSUs/local bodies
The most important number to internalise: ~90% of Indian workers are in informal employment, regardless of whether they are in the organised or unorganised enterprise sector. Even within organised manufacturing, contract and temporary workers (typically without full benefits) form a growing share.
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Section 04 · Sectoral Distribution
Where Indians Actually Work — Sectoral Shares
~46%
Agriculture & allied (PLFS 2022–23)
~13%
Manufacturing
~13%
Construction
~28%
Services (trade, transport, finance, public, personal)
  • Agriculture share has fallen from ~62% (1993–94) to ~42% (2018–19) before partial pandemic-era reversal
  • Manufacturing share has been stuck at 11–14% for two decades — the “missing middle” of Indian structural transformation
  • Construction share more than doubled from 5% (1999–2000) to 13%+ — absorbing displaced agricultural labour
  • Services growth concentrated in low-productivity self-employed activity, not formal services jobs
India's structural transformation has not followed the East Asian path of agriculture → manufacturing → services. It has gone agriculture → construction and informal services. The implications for productivity, wages, and worker protection are large and largely unaddressed.
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A Framing on the Indian Labour Market
"India has not industrialised in the classical sense. It has not absorbed its agricultural workforce into formal manufacturing. It has built an economy in which the majority of workers operate without contracts, without security, and largely without voice. Calling this ‘the labour market’ without qualification is the first analytical mistake."
— a synthesis from Jayati Ghosh, Jean Drèze, Santosh Mehrotra, Ravi Srivastava · representative formulation
For policy: the design question is not how to clean up the formal labour market — it serves a small minority — but how to extend protection, voice, and productivity to the 90% who are already working but are not currently in the regulatory frame.
For practitioners: when you encounter a worker, default-assume informality. Default-assume no written contract, no social security, irregular wages. Programme design that assumes the formal regime applies will help only the minority who least need help.
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05
Section Five
Informal Work — Where Most Indians Are
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Section 05 · The Definition
Informal Employment — the ILO/NCEUS Definition
Informal employment
Employment without legal protection, social security coverage, or written contract. Includes informal wage workers in formal enterprises, all workers in informal enterprises, and self-employed in informal sector activities. The 17th ICLS (2003) provided the international statistical framework.
In India, the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS, chaired by Arjun Sengupta), in its 2007 report “Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods,” estimated that 92% of the workforce was in unorganised/informal employment. The number has fallen modestly since but remains in the 85–90% range.
Three categories of informal worker
  • Informal wage workers — without written contract or social security; in formal or informal enterprises
  • Informal self-employed — own-account workers, contributing family workers, owners of informal enterprises
  • Casual wage workers — daily-wage labour without regularity or benefits
Don't confuse “informal” with “illegal.” Most informal work is legal but exists outside the regulatory and protective frame. The label is descriptive, not normative.
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Section 05 · Theoretical Anchors
Jan Breman & Barbara Harriss-White — the Standing References
Two scholars have shaped the field of Indian informal-economy studies more than most. Jan Breman's decades of fieldwork in Gujarat and Western India produced the canonical anthropology of footloose labour. Barbara Harriss-White's work theorised India's informal economy as the actual structure of Indian capitalism, not a transitional remnant.
"What we are seeing is not the disappearance of informality but its consolidation as the basic mode of work organisation in the contemporary Indian economy."
— Barbara Harriss-White · India Working: Essays on Society and Economy · 2003
Key Breman texts
  • Of Peasants, Migrants and Paupers (1985)
  • Footloose Labour (1996)
  • The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class (2004)
  • Outcast Labour in Asia (2010)
  • Capitalism, Inequality and Labour in India (2019)
Key Harriss-White texts
  • India Working (2003)
  • Rural Commercial Capital (2008)
  • Editor of multiple volumes on labour and informality with the Centre for the Analysis of South Asia, Oxford
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Section 05 · The Organising Innovation
SEWA — the Self Employed Women's Association
  • Founded 1972 in Ahmedabad by Ela Bhatt, with the Textile Labour Association lineage
  • Combined trade union form with cooperative organising, tailored for self-employed women workers
  • ~21 lakh members across India and global affiliates by mid-2020s
  • Sectors: home-based workers, street vendors, agricultural labour, manual labour, service workers
  • Operates SEWA Bank (cooperative), insurance, training, healthcare, child-care
  • Recognised by ILO, WIEGO, and the Government of India as a model
Why SEWA matters analytically
SEWA showed that the standard divide between “trade union” and “cooperative” does not fit the actual condition of most workers in the informal economy. A new institutional form was needed — one that combined collective voice with collective enterprise. SEWA built it. The model has been adapted globally through WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising) and inspired similar formations in Latin America and Africa.
Ela Bhatt's autobiographical writing, Renana Jhabvala's analytical work, and Marty Chen's WIEGO scholarship are the standing references on SEWA and informal-worker organising.
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Section 05 · A Specific Case
Street Vendors & the 2014 Act
Street vendors — estimated at ~10 million in India — have been the focus of one of the most successful informal-worker legislative efforts. Decades of organising by NASVI (National Association of Street Vendors of India) and supportive legal advocacy produced the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014.
  • Right to vend recognised; eviction without process prohibited
  • Town Vending Committees (TVCs) at municipal level for planning and grievance
  • Survey-based identification and certification of vendors
  • Mandatory minimum representation of vendors and women in TVCs
  • Protection during natural calamities and from arbitrary action
The implementation gap
  • Many cities have not constituted functional TVCs
  • Vendor surveys incomplete or contested
  • Hawking-zone/no-hawking-zone designation often arbitrary
  • Police harassment and bribery continue
  • Smart City and street-clearance drives have undermined vending rights
  • PM SVANidhi (2020–) credit scheme provides limited financial support
The 2014 Act remains a model of how informal-sector workers can win statutory rights. Implementation, as elsewhere, is the binding constraint.
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Section 05 · The Domestic Work Question
Domestic Workers — Visible & Unprotected
  • ~50 million domestic workers in India (NDWM and various estimates); largely women, largely migrant
  • Excluded from most labour law protection, including the new 2019–20 codes
  • India ratified neither ILO Convention 189 (Domestic Workers, 2011) nor 190 (Violence and Harassment, 2019)
  • Some states have notified minimum wages for domestic workers; many have not, or set rates well below market
  • Sexual harassment, violence, and confinement (especially for live-in domestic workers) routinely under-reported
The organising landscape
  • NDWM — National Domestic Workers Movement
  • SEWA Delhi, Karnataka Domestic Workers Movement, Tamil Nadu Domestic Workers Welfare Trust
  • Domestic Workers Rights Campaign (national platform)
  • State Welfare Boards in some states (Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka)
  • 2008 Unorganised Workers Social Security Act provides limited cover
A draft Domestic Workers Welfare Bill has been pending for over a decade. The Supreme Court's 2010 judgment in Vishakha framework was extended to domestic workers via the 2013 Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, but enforcement is rare.
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Section 05 · Construction — the Largest Informal Employer
Construction Workers — ~70 Million
Construction is the largest single non-farm employer in India, absorbing roughly 70 million workers. The Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996, and the Cess Act of the same year, created a dedicated welfare architecture — one of the better-designed informal-sector laws on paper.
  • 1% cess on construction project costs deposited into State Welfare Boards
  • Welfare benefits: pension, accident insurance, scholarships, maternity, disability, funeral assistance
  • An estimated ₹90,000+ crore accumulated in BOCW Welfare Boards across states
  • Massive under-utilisation: only a fraction reaches actual workers
  • Registration coverage uneven; many migrant workers excluded
The implementation problem
  • Boards have been slow to disburse benefits; CAG reports document chronic under-spending
  • Workers and contractors often unaware of welfare entitlements
  • Registration requires documents many migrant workers don't have
  • Inter-state portability remains weak despite e-Shram universalisation efforts
  • Inspections and cess collection have weakened over the past decade
The BOCW Act is a useful test case: a good informal-worker law, with substantial financial provision, that has under-delivered because of governance failures rather than fundamental design flaws.
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A Framing on Informal Work
"The unorganised sector is not a transitional category waiting to become formal. It is the actual structure of work in India. Designing for the next decade means designing for the 90%, not for the 10% who already have written contracts and provident funds."
— a working synthesis from the NCEUS Report (Sengupta Commission, 2007) and subsequent practitioner literature
Three implications: (1) social protection has to follow the worker, not the employer; (2) collective forms have to combine union and cooperative functions; (3) regulatory design has to assume informal default and build protection upward, not assume formality and treat informality as deviation.
Reading list: NCEUS Report (2007); Breman (multiple); Harriss-White (2003); Ravi Srivastava on migration; SEWA & WIEGO papers; State of Working India 2018, 2021, 2023 (Azim Premji University).
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06
Section Six
Wages, Inequality & Penalties
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Section 06 · The Wage Map
How Wages Are Set in India
  • Minimum wages — notified separately by central and state governments by sector and region; Code on Wages 2019 introduced national floor wage concept
  • Statutory bonus — under Payment of Bonus Act, 1965 (for organised-sector workers up to a wage ceiling)
  • Industrial Wage Boards — sector-specific tripartite wage-setting in some industries
  • Pay Commissions — for central and state government employees
  • Collective bargaining — in unionised parts of organised manufacturing and services; declining
  • Market wages — in practice, what most informal workers actually receive, often below notified minimum wages
The minimum-wage compliance problem
Multiple studies (Belser & Rani 2015; Soundararajan 2019) find that 25–50% of wage workers in informal employment receive less than the notified minimum wage for their sector and state. Compliance is highest in the public sector and large formal firms, and lowest in agriculture, construction, and domestic work. The minimum wage is therefore aspirational rather than binding for the majority.
Anoop Satpathy Expert Committee (2019) recommended a national minimum wage of ₹375/day. The actual notified national floor wage under the Code on Wages remains substantially below this. The gap is political, not technical.
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Section 06 · Wage Levels and Trends
What Indian Workers Actually Earn
₹~10,000
average monthly wage of regular wage/salaried worker, all-India (PLFS 2022–23 estimates)
₹~25,000
average monthly wage in organised manufacturing, ASI 2021–22
~₹400
typical daily wage for casual labour in non-public works, men, all-India (PLFS 2022–23)
~₹280
corresponding figure for women casual workers — ~30% wage gap visible in raw numbers before any controls
Wage trends over the past decade
  • Real wages for casual labour grew 2007–2014, stagnated 2014–19, and have grown slowly since
  • Real wages for regular salaried workers have grown more steadily but slowly
  • Manufacturing wages have lagged services and finance
  • The wage share of GDP has declined; profit share has risen (multiple analyses)
  • Top-end wages (CXO, finance, IT senior) have risen sharply; bottom-end has not
Reading: SoWI 2018, 2021, 2023; Mehrotra & Parida; Reetika Khera and Jean Drèze on rural wages; CMIE wage data with appropriate methodological caveats.
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Section 06 · The Gender Penalty
The Gender Wage Gap in Indian Work
  • Raw gender wage gap in India: ~25–30% in casual labour; ~20% in regular employment (PLFS multi-round estimates)
  • Most of the raw gap survives controls for education, experience, occupation, and region
  • Sticky-floor effect: gap is largest at the bottom of the distribution; women over-concentrated in low-paid occupations
  • Glass-ceiling effect: gap also widens at the top; female under-representation in senior positions
  • Occupational segregation accounts for a substantial share of overall gap
  • Maternity penalty: visible in earnings trajectories around childbirth
Decomposition findings
Standard Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions of Indian wage data (Deshpande et al, Madheswaran et al) attribute roughly 30–50% of the gender wage gap to discrimination — the unexplained component after controlling for measured characteristics. The size depends on specification, sector, and time period. The number is consistently large enough to indicate a structural feature, not a measurement artefact.
Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 (now subsumed in Code on Wages, 2019) has been on the books for nearly five decades. Enforcement is essentially absent. The gap is a policy failure, not a knowledge gap.
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Section 06 · The Caste Penalty
The Caste Wage Penalty
SC/ST workers earn 15–20% less than upper-caste workers with similar measured characteristics — a finding that has held across multiple PLFS/NSS rounds and methodological variants. The penalty is largest in the urban regular-salaried private sector and smallest in public-sector employment, where transparent rules constrain discriminatory wage-setting.
"Equally qualified Dalit and upper-caste workers face systematically different wages and hiring outcomes in the urban private sector. The discrimination component cannot be wished away by appeals to merit."
— Sukhadeo Thorat & Paul Attewell · EPW · 2007
Three mechanisms documented
  • Direct wage discrimination — same job, different pay; rare in formal records but documented in informal labour markets
  • Occupational sorting — channelling SC/ST workers into lower-paid occupations regardless of capability
  • Network exclusion — reduced access to higher-paying job referrals through intra-caste hiring networks
Reading: Ashwini Deshpande's The Grammar of Caste; Sukhadeo Thorat & Newman's Blocked by Caste; ImpactMojo's Caste Studies 101 (companion deck) for the broader analytical framework.
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Section 06 · Inequality at the Top
India's Income & Wealth Inequality — Topline
India's income and wealth distribution has become substantially more unequal over the past three decades. The World Inequality Lab (Chancel, Piketty et al) has produced the most cited series. Their 2024 update found Indian inequality among the highest in the world.
~22.6%
share of national income going to the top 1% in India, 2022–23 (WIL estimates) — among the highest globally
~40%
share of national wealth held by the top 1% (WIL estimates)
What the trend shows
  • Top 1% income share has roughly doubled since 1980
  • Bottom 50% income share has fallen
  • The middle 40% (roughly the “middle class”) has stagnated in share
  • Wage share of national income has fallen as profit share has risen
  • Indian inequality now exceeds Brazilian inequality in several measures
The wage compression argument: rising top-end income is largely capital income (rents, profits, dividends, capital gains) rather than labour income. Wage policy alone cannot address it; tax policy and asset distribution have to be part of the answer.
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Section 06 · The Living Wage Question
Minimum Wage vs Living Wage
Living wage
A wage sufficient to meet the basic needs of a worker and dependants — food, shelter, clothing, education, healthcare, transport, and a small margin for unforeseen circumstances. ILO Resolution 2024 set out a tripartite definition. Conceptually distinct from minimum wage, which is set as a regulatory floor.
  • 15th Indian Labour Conference (1957) needs-based formula: 3 consumption units per worker; balanced diet at 2,700 kcal; clothing, housing, fuel, light, etc.
  • Supreme Court in Workmen v Reptakos Brett (1991) added 25% provision for education, medical, recreation, social obligations
  • Anoop Satpathy Expert Committee (2019) calculated ₹375/day national minimum wage
  • Most state minimum wages remain below this benchmark
The corporate angle
  • Living-wage commitments by major brands (Unilever, IKEA, H&M, others)
  • Global Living Wage Coalition methodology being applied to Indian supply chains
  • Tea, garments, electronics audits revealing systematic gaps
  • Anker methodology and other living-wage benchmarks now publicly available for many Indian states
  • Supplier compliance lags brand commitments
For practitioners: when discussing wages in development programmes, distinguish whether the benchmark is statutory minimum (often well below subsistence), needs-based (15th ILC formula), or living wage (sufficient + margin). The choice changes the policy ask.
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A Framing on Wages and Inequality
"The wage is not just a price; it is a social contract. India has not had a serious national conversation about what work is worth, who decides, and what minimum dignity attaches to a day's labour. Until that conversation happens, ‘reform’ will remain a euphemism for shifting risk further onto workers."
— a synthesis from contemporary labour economics scholarship · representative formulation
For policy: a credible wage floor at living-wage levels, indexed to prices, with effective enforcement, is a more important intervention than most active labour-market programmes. India has the legal architecture; what is missing is enforcement and political will.
For practitioners: caste and gender wage penalties are not measurement noise; they are the structure of the Indian labour market. Programme design that treats them as residual misses the point.
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07
Section Seven
Labour Law & the 2019–20 Codes
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Section 07 · Constitutional Foundations
Labour in the Constitution of India
ProvisionWhat it doesForce
Art. 23Prohibits forced labour and traffic in human beingsFundamental right; basis for bonded-labour and trafficking laws
Art. 24Prohibits child labour in factories, mines, hazardous employment for those under 14Fundamental right; basis for child-labour legislation
Art. 39(a)–(e)Adequate means of livelihood; equal pay for equal work; non-exploitation; protection of workers' healthDirective Principles — not directly enforceable but bind state policy
Art. 41Right to work, education, public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sicknessDirective Principle
Art. 42Just and humane conditions of work; maternity reliefDirective Principle
Art. 43Living wage; conditions of work ensuring decent standard of lifeDirective Principle
Art. 43AWorker participation in management of industriesDirective Principle (added 1976)
Concurrent List, Entry 22, 23, 24Trade unions; social security; welfare of labour — both Centre and States legislateDistribution of powers; explains overlapping laws
For lawyers and policy practitioners: Indian labour law sits on a constitutional architecture that ranks worker protection as a state duty. The Directive Principles are not toothless — they have repeatedly been used by the Supreme Court (e.g., Olga Tellis, Bandhua Mukti Morcha) to read fundamental rights expansively in the labour context.
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Section 07 · The Pre-Code Architecture
The 29 Laws That Were Consolidated
Before the 2019–20 Codes, Indian labour law sat across 29+ central statutes plus a thicket of state laws. The Codes consolidated these into four. The pre-Code architecture is essential to understand because it is what existed when most current case-law and practitioner training was developed.
  • Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 — the central law on retrenchment, layoff, lockout, strikes
  • Factories Act, 1948 — safety, working hours, women and child labour in factories
  • Minimum Wages Act, 1948 — statutory minimum wages by sector
  • Payment of Wages Act, 1936 — timing, mode, deductions
  • Trade Unions Act, 1926 — registration and rights of unions
  • Contract Labour (R&A) Act, 1970 — regulation/abolition of contract labour
  • Plantation Labour Act, 1951; Mines Act, 1952; Beedi Workers Act, 1966; etc.
Foundational case-law
  • Bangalore Water Supply v Rajappa (1978) — defined “industry” expansively under the IDA
  • Workmen of Hindustan Lever v Hindustan Lever (1990s) — on the meaning of “workman”
  • People's Union for Democratic Rights v UoI (1982) — bonded labour and Asiad case
  • Bandhua Mukti Morcha v UoI (1984) — bonded-labour identification and rehabilitation
  • Vishakha v State of Rajasthan (1997) — sexual harassment guidelines, codified 2013
  • Olga Tellis v Bombay Municipal Corp (1985) — right to livelihood as part of right to life
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Section 07 · The Four Codes
The 2019–20 Labour Codes — Consolidation
CodeYearReplaces (key Acts)
Code on Wages2019Payment of Wages Act 1936; Minimum Wages Act 1948; Payment of Bonus Act 1965; Equal Remuneration Act 1976
Industrial Relations Code2020Industrial Disputes Act 1947; Trade Unions Act 1926; Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act 1946
OSH & Working Conditions Code2020Factories Act 1948; Mines Act 1952; Plantations Labour Act 1951; Contract Labour (R&A) Act 1970; ISMW Act 1979; 8 others
Code on Social Security2020EPF&MP Act 1952; ESI Act 1948; Maternity Benefit Act 1961; Payment of Gratuity Act 1972; Building & Other Construction Workers Welfare Cess Act 1996; Unorganised Workers Social Security Act 2008; 3 others
The implementation status (as of early 2026): all four Codes have been notified by Parliament, but the rules under each have been progressively notified by central and state governments. Implementation timelines have been repeatedly extended. Several state-level rules remain pending. Practitioners should check current notification status before any formal advice.
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Section 07 · Code on Wages, 2019
Code on Wages — Key Changes
  • Universal coverage: all workers, not just those in scheduled employments under MWA 1948
  • National floor wage: central government to notify a national floor wage, below which states cannot set minimums
  • Statutory definition of wages: includes basic, dearness allowance, retaining allowance; excludes bonus, HRA, OT, conveyance allowance
  • Equal remuneration: applies to all employments (was earlier sector-specific)
  • Inspection-cum-Facilitation Officer: partial replacement of inspector regime
  • Penalty enhancements for non-compliance
Critical concerns
  • National floor wage notified at level below most state minimum wages — effectively non-binding
  • Wage definition shifts costs onto allowances — some employers may restructure compensation to reduce statutory benefits base
  • Reduced inspection enforcement may weaken implementation
  • Equal remuneration still depends on enforcement, which has been weak under prior law
For HR practitioners and lawyers: the “wages” definition under the new Code (Section 2(y), Code on Wages) reshapes how PF, gratuity, and bonus base values are computed. EPFO has issued multiple clarifications. Court litigation on the definition is ongoing.
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Section 07 · IR Code, 2020
Industrial Relations Code — the Most Contested
  • Threshold for prior government permission for retrenchment/layoff/closure raised from 100 to 300 workers (Section 77)
  • Negotiating union: single negotiating union if any union has 51%+ membership; negotiating council otherwise
  • Strike notice: 14-day prior notice mandatory in all industries (was earlier limited)
  • Fixed-term employment: formalised; provides parity of benefits but not job security
  • Worker definition: includes those earning up to ₹18,000/month for purposes of supervisory exclusion
  • Re-skilling fund for retrenched workers
The political controversy
The 300-worker threshold was the central issue in the 2020–21 farm-and-labour-law agitation. Trade unions argued it puts ~75% of currently-protected workers outside the prior-permission regime. Industry argued the earlier 100-worker threshold was a binding constraint on hiring. The empirical evidence on whether the threshold actually constrained hiring is mixed; the political disagreement is sharp.
The strike notice and trade union recognition provisions have been criticised as restricting collective bargaining. Tripartite consultation under the ILC has effectively been suspended.
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Section 07 · OSH Code, 2020
Occupational Safety, Health & Working Conditions Code
  • Wider coverage: factories with 20 workers (with power) or 40 workers (without); previously 10/20
  • Working hours: standard 8 hours/day, 48 hours/week; overtime up to 125 hours per quarter
  • Women's working hours: permitted in night shifts with consent and safety conditions
  • Annual health check-up mandatory for certain categories
  • Inter-state migrant workers: registration on national database; portability of social security benefits envisaged
  • Appointment letter mandatory for all employees — addressing one of the central drivers of informality
What is potentially positive
  • Mandatory appointment letter could substantially reduce wage-employment informality if enforced
  • Inter-state migrant worker provisions improve on the largely-unimplemented 1979 Act
  • Single registration and licensing across multiple acts reduces compliance burden
  • Annual return reduces from multiple to single
Trade-off: enforcement capacity has not increased proportionate to expanded coverage. Without inspectors, the threshold expansion may not translate to actual compliance.
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Section 07 · Social Security Code, 2020
Social Security Code — the Universal Aspiration
  • Universal coverage: framework intended to extend social security to all workers including unorganised, gig, and platform workers
  • Gig/platform worker definition: for the first time, statutorily recognised — enabling targeted social security schemes
  • Aggregator contribution: 1–2% of turnover or 5% of payments to gig/platform workers, capped, into a Social Security Fund
  • e-Shram database as the registration platform for unorganised workers
  • Maternity benefit: 26 weeks paid leave (already in 2017 amendment)
  • Gratuity: threshold for fixed-term workers reduced; portability provisions
Where implementation lags
  • Social Security Fund for gig workers not yet operationalised at national scale (state initiatives are running)
  • e-Shram registration high but benefit linkage limited
  • Many state-specific welfare board funds remain under-utilised
  • EPFO and ESIC rules under the new Code being progressively notified
  • Inter-state portability still partial
The Code creates the architecture for universal social security. Whether it delivers depends on (a) employer/aggregator contribution enforcement and (b) state capacity for benefit disbursement. Both have historically been weak.
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A Framing on the Codes
"The Codes simplify, consolidate, and in some places extend protection. They also raise thresholds, reduce inspection intensity, and push more risk onto workers in fixed-term and informal arrangements. Whether they help workers or hurt them depends on details of state-level rules, enforcement, and the political balance going forward. The honest answer in 2026 is: the jury is still out."
— a balanced reading from labour-law practitioners and the policy literature · ImpactMojo synthesis
For practitioners and lawyers: the Codes change the doctrine but case-law from the prior regime remains foundational for interpretation. Read the new Codes alongside prior judgments; many concepts (industry, workman, retrenchment) carry forward with modified contours.
For organisers: the IR Code raises the bar for collective action in several ways. Building member density, building cross-firm sectoral capacity, and combining union work with cooperative/welfare functions (the SEWA model) are practical responses to the new architecture.
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08
Section Eight
Social Protection & Worker Welfare
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Section 08 · The Conceptual Frame
What “Social Protection” Covers
Social protection (ILO Recommendation 202)
A set of public measures providing income security and access to essential health care across the life cycle. The 2012 ILO Recommendation 202 set out the “social protection floor” concept — a basic level of protection guaranteed to all members of society as a human right.
  • Contributory schemes — EPF, ESI, gratuity, contributory pension; financed by worker and employer contributions
  • Tax-funded schemes — PMAY, PM-KISAN, NFSA PDS, NREGA, old-age and widow pensions
  • Welfare boards — for specific worker categories, financed by cess or budgetary grants
  • In-kind transfers — PDS food, school meals, ICDS supplementary nutrition, free healthcare
Five domains (ILO life-cycle)
  • Children — nutrition, health, education support
  • Working age — unemployment, sickness, maternity, work injury
  • Old age and survivors — pensions
  • Disability — long-term income support
  • Health care — access to essential services
India's coverage gap is largest in working-age protection — unemployment insurance and adequate maternity benefits for informal workers remain absent or partial. Old-age pension coverage is rising (NPS, APY) but inadequate for most.
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Section 08 · The Contributory Pillars
EPFO & ESIC — Coverage and Gaps
  • EPFO — Employees' Provident Fund Organisation; mandatory for establishments with 20+ employees; ~7 crore active subscribers
  • EPF: employee 12% + employer 12% (3.67% to EPF, 8.33% to EPS pension); current EPF interest rate ~8.25%
  • EPS: pension scheme with retirement benefit; long-running litigation on pension on actual salary (EPFO v Sunil Kumar B, 2022 SC ruling)
  • ESIC — Employees' State Insurance; medical and cash benefits; for workers earning up to ₹21,000/month; ~3.5 crore beneficiaries
  • ESI: employee 0.75% + employer 3.25%; covers medical, maternity, disability, dependant benefit
Coverage gaps
  • EPFO covers ~6–7% of total Indian workforce
  • ESIC reach is geographically limited; many districts have no ESI hospital
  • Employer evasion through contract labour and below-threshold establishment splitting
  • Wage definition disputes (post-Code on Wages) affect calculation base
  • Atal Pension Yojana (APY, 2015–) extends pension to informal workers but enrollment skews to lower contribution slabs
PFRDA-administered National Pension System (NPS) covers government employees post-2004 and offers voluntary tier for others. Old Pension Scheme (OPS) demand from state government employees has become a political issue across multiple states.
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Section 08 · The Universal Database
e-Shram & Unorganised Worker Registration
e-Shram, launched in August 2021, is a central database of unorganised workers. The platform was designed to enable benefit portability and targeted scheme delivery. By early 2026, registrations exceeded 30 crore.
  • Self-registration linked to Aadhaar and bank account
  • Universal Account Number (UAN) for unorganised workers
  • Free accident insurance up to ₹2 lakh under PMSBY linked at registration
  • Designed as gateway for future scheme convergence
  • Data on occupational distribution: ~52% in agriculture, ~10% in domestic/household work, ~9% in construction, ~7% in apparel
What still needs work
  • Benefit linkage beyond accident insurance has been slow
  • Inter-state portability of state welfare board benefits remains partial
  • Registration quality varies; some occupational categorisation appears imprecise
  • Update mechanism for occupation/wage changes weak
  • Convergence with PDS, MGNREGA, EPFO not yet fully operational
e-Shram is a major data infrastructure achievement. Whether it becomes the basis for genuine universal social protection or remains a registration database without commensurate benefit delivery is the open question.
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Section 08 · State Welfare Architecture
State Welfare Boards — the Operational Layer
  • BOCW Welfare Boards (state-wise) for construction workers, financed by 1% cess on construction project value
  • Sector-specific boards — Tamil Nadu Manual Workers Welfare Board, Kerala Beedi and Cigar Workers Welfare Fund, Maharashtra Mathadi Workers Welfare Boards, etc.
  • Domestic worker welfare boards in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra (varying functions)
  • Tribal welfare structures — ITDP/TSP scheme convergence at state level
  • Unorganised Workers Social Security Boards under the 2008 Act, replicated under SS Code 2020
The Tamil Nadu Manual Workers Welfare model
Tamil Nadu has built one of India's most comprehensive welfare board structures, covering 38+ scheduled employments. Features include scholarships, medical, marriage assistance, maternity, accident, funeral, and pension benefits. Coverage of >1 crore registered workers. State spending considerable; benefit delivery functional. This is the kind of working model that the 2020 SS Code aims to replicate nationally.
For practitioners working in any state: identify the state-specific welfare boards relevant to your worker category. The benefits may already exist; the binding constraint is often awareness and registration support, not absence of legal entitlement.
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Section 08 · Tax-Funded Schemes
The Major Tax-Funded Schemes for Workers and Their Families
SchemeWhat it doesScale
NFSA PDS5 kg subsidised foodgrain per person per month; 35 kg per Antyodaya household~80 crore beneficiaries
MGNREGA100 days legal wage employment guarantee per rural household~7–10 crore households/year
PMAY (Rural & Urban)Housing subsidy for eligible households4+ crore houses sanctioned
PM-KISAN₹6,000/year direct income support to landholding farmer households~10 crore beneficiaries
PMJDYUniversal bank account access~50+ crore accounts
PMJAY (Ayushman Bharat)Hospital insurance up to ₹5 lakh per family for bottom 40%~12 crore eligible families
NSAPOld age, widow, disability pensions for BPL households~3 crore beneficiaries; benefits historically inadequate (₹200–500/month from centre)
JSY / PMMVYMaternity benefit conditional cash transferSeveral crore beneficiaries cumulatively
The architectural question: India has built a substantial tax-funded social protection system that reaches a large share of low-income households. Adequacy varies sharply (NSAP pension levels remain inadequate; MGNREGA wages often below state minimum wage; PMAY coverage of urban informal settlements weak). The frame is in place; the calibration remains the work.
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Section 08 · Health and Work
Health Protection for Workers — the Coverage Map
  • ESIC for organised-sector workers earning up to ₹21,000/month
  • CGHS / state government health schemes for government employees
  • Ayushman Bharat PMJAY for bottom-40% households (largely informal)
  • State health insurance schemes — Aarogyasri (AP/Telangana), Mahatma Phule Jan Arogya (Maharashtra), Chiranjeevi (Rajasthan), Karunya (Kerala) and others
  • Out-of-pocket expenditure remains ~50%+ of total health spending in India — among highest in middle-income countries
  • Catastrophic health expenditure drives ~5 crore Indians into poverty annually (multiple estimates)
Specific worker-health concerns
  • Silicosis among stone quarry, gem-cutting, and construction workers
  • Pesticide exposure in agriculture
  • Heat stress in construction, brick kilns, agriculture (worsening with climate)
  • Ergonomic injuries among domestic workers, garment workers
  • Sexual harassment as occupational health (Vishakha framework, POSH Act 2013)
  • Mental health under platform algorithmic pressure (Karnataka 2024 hearings)
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A Framing on Social Protection
"Social protection is not charity. It is the public underwriting of the labour force on which the economy depends. The case for universal social protection rests on the same logic as the case for universal education and universal sanitation — productivity, dignity, and the social compact."
— ILO Social Protection Floor framework, Recommendation 202 · 2012
The unfinished agenda: universal pension at adequate level (NSAP needs upgrading); universal maternity benefit including informal workers; portable PDS and welfare board benefits; functional gig-worker fund operationalisation; expansion of EPFO/ESIC to fixed-term and contract workers without dilution.
For practitioners: in any livelihood programme, map existing entitlements first. The most effective intervention is often helping eligible workers access benefits they are entitled to but do not know about. New schemes are not always needed; coverage of existing ones is.
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09
Section Nine
Gig, Platform & Future of Work
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Section 09 · The Definitions
Gig Work, Platform Work & the Classification Question
Gig worker (SS Code 2020)
A person who performs work or participates in a work arrangement and earns from such activities outside of traditional employer-employee relationship.
Platform worker (SS Code 2020)
A person engaged in or undertaking platform work, i.e., a work arrangement outside of a traditional employer-employee relationship in which organisations or individuals use online platforms to access other organisations or individuals to solve specific problems or to provide specific services or any such other activities, in exchange for payment.
  • NITI Aayog (2022): ~7.7 million gig workers in India in 2020–21; projected to reach ~23.5 million by 2029–30
  • Major sectors: ride-hailing (Ola, Uber, Rapido), food delivery (Zomato, Swiggy), grocery (Blinkit, Zepto, Instamart), logistics, home services (UrbanCompany), e-commerce delivery
  • The classification question: are gig workers employees, contractors, or a third category?
  • Different jurisdictions answering differently — UK Supreme Court (Uber 2021), California Prop 22 (2020), Spain Riders Law (2021), EU Platform Work Directive (2024)
  • India's SS Code creates a third category: gig/platform worker, distinct from “employee”
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Section 09 · Algorithmic Management
Algorithm as Boss — the New Form of Control
Platform work has produced a new form of management: control by algorithm rather than supervisor. Workers are matched to tasks, paid, rated, rewarded, and disciplined by software systems whose logic is largely opaque to them. This is qualitatively different from earlier forms of contract or piece-rate work.
  • Allocation — which orders/rides go to which worker; opacity in selection logic
  • Pricing — surge multipliers, incentives, base rates set by algorithm
  • Performance — ratings from customers feed into worker access
  • Discipline — account deactivations often without prior notice or appeal mechanism
  • Information asymmetry — workers see only their own data; platform sees everyone's
Documented worker concerns
  • Effective hourly earnings often below state minimum wage after fuel and vehicle costs
  • Long working hours required to hit incentive thresholds
  • Account deactivation without due process
  • Unilateral changes to pay structure
  • Heat stress and accident exposure in delivery work
  • No paid leave, no insurance unless platform-provided
  • Reduced bargaining power in “rated” work environments
Reading: Aditi Surie, Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon at the Centre for Internet and Society; IT for Change reports; Fairwork India studies; Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT) and Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union briefings.
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Section 09 · The State-Level Response
Rajasthan 2023 & Karnataka 2024 — the State Gig Laws
Rajasthan Platform-based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act, 2023
  • First state law in India dedicated to gig workers
  • Welfare Board for gig workers established
  • Welfare Cess on aggregator turnover (1–2%) deposited into fund
  • Mandatory worker registration by aggregators
  • Grievance redressal mechanism via Welfare Board
Karnataka 2024 Bill
  • Karnataka Platform-based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act, 2024
  • Built on the Rajasthan template with refinements
  • Includes algorithmic transparency requirements
  • Welfare Board with worker representation
What the state laws do and don't do
  • Do create welfare funding mechanism — first concrete operationalisation
  • Do require platform registration of workers and grievance handling
  • Do not classify gig workers as employees — they remain a third category
  • Do not provide minimum-wage protection or working-hour limits
  • Do not directly regulate algorithmic management
  • Implementation rules and fund operationalisation pending in both states
For practitioners: track these state laws closely. They are testing grounds for what national social-security architecture for gig workers can look like. Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Maharashtra have all signalled intent to follow.
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Section 09 · AI & Work
AI Exposure of Indian Occupations
Generative AI exposure of work is a 2023–onward question with rapidly evolving evidence. Cazzaniga et al (IMF 2024) estimated ~26% of Indian jobs are exposed to AI, with ~12% in highly exposed categories, ~14% in moderately exposed. Lower than US (~60%) but still substantial. The exposure is concentrated in services, especially BPO, content moderation, basic legal/financial analysis, customer support.
  • BPO sector: significant share of routine voice and text work potentially automatable
  • Content moderation: already partly automated, with complex worker mental-health implications
  • Legal: contract review, due diligence, junior associate work all under pressure
  • Translation, transcription, data entry: substantial near-term displacement
  • Coding: senior engineers more likely to use AI as assistant; junior engineer roles more exposed
The Indian-specific dynamic
India's services-led growth model has been built partly on cost arbitrage in ITES/BPO. AI substitution at the lower-skill end could undermine this employment escalator before it has fully delivered for the workforce. Yet AI also enables solo entrepreneurs and small teams to compete in markets previously closed to them. The net effect is unclear and probably depends on policy choices around skilling, labour-market protection, and AI deployment regulation.
Reading: Azim Premji University CSE upcoming reports; ILO 2024 World Employment and Social Outlook on AI; Felten, Raj & Seamans methodology for AI exposure scoring.
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Section 09 · The Care Economy Bet
The Care Economy as the Future of Work
As Indian society ages, urbanises, and shifts to nuclear households, demand for paid care work — childcare, eldercare, healthcare assistance, domestic services — will rise sharply. ILO 2018 estimates suggest investing 2% of GDP in care could generate ~24 million additional jobs in India, predominantly female. This is structurally a more labour-intensive growth path than continuing services or manufacturing-led growth.
  • Anganwadi workers (~14 lakh) and ASHAs (~10 lakh) are the existing public care workforce; consistently under-paid
  • Eldercare demand will rise as 60+ population grows from ~14 crore (2021) to ~22 crore by 2031
  • Childcare: crèches under POSHAN Abhiyaan, NREGA crèche provision underutilised
  • Disability care: largely informal, family-based; NIEPID-trained professional workforce limited
  • Healthcare assistant pipeline expanding through AYUSH and skilling missions
The dignity question
Care work is currently low-paid because it is socially constructed as “women's work,” with the labour treated as natural rather than skilled. Building a care economy that delivers good jobs requires recognising care as skilled work, professionalising training, and pricing it fairly. The current treatment of anganwadi workers and ASHAs as “volunteers” with honoraria rather than salaries is a central failure to address.
Reading: Ratna Sudarshan's work on care; Nancy Folbre internationally; Sonalde Desai on Indian women's work; AIDWA and others on anganwadi/ASHA worker rights.
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Section 09 · The Skilling Architecture
Skill India — Architecture and Reality
  • NSDC — National Skill Development Corporation; PPP funding sector skill councils
  • MSDE — Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (2014–)
  • NCVET — National Council for Vocational Education and Training; quality assurance
  • PMKVY — Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana; flagship short-term skilling
  • ITIs — Industrial Training Institutes; ~15,000 institutes; major scaling and reform challenge
  • NAPS — National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme; subsidy for apprenticeship engagement
What the evidence shows
Evaluation studies of PMKVY (e.g., NCAER, MSDE's own 2018 study) found placement rates around 25–30% with limited persistence. Most placements were in low-wage informal-sector roles. The diagnostic: skilling alone, without complementary demand-side job creation and wage protection, has limited effect on worker outcomes. Karthik Muralidharan and others have argued for a stronger emphasis on apprenticeship and on-the-job learning over standalone classroom skilling.
A more useful frame: skilling as one part of a broader active labour market policy that includes job matching, wage subsidies, mobility support, and labour rights enforcement. India has emphasised supply-side skilling at the expense of these complements.
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A Framing on the Future of Work
"The future of work in India is being shaped by three forces simultaneously: platform-mediated gig employment, AI-driven displacement, and care-economy expansion. Each pulls in different directions on questions of wages, security, and dignity. Public policy that addresses one without the others will produce incoherent outcomes."
— a synthesis from labour-economics literature on Indian work transitions · ImpactMojo
For policy: three immediate priorities — (1) operationalise the Social Security Fund for gig workers nationally; (2) build a serious care-economy investment programme with adequate worker pay; (3) regulate algorithmic management for transparency and due process, drawing on EU Platform Work Directive precedent.
For practitioners: the “future of work” is also the present of work for the 7–10 million gig workers and the few crore care workers already in the system. Their conditions today determine what the future actually looks like.
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10
Section Ten
Trade Unions & Worker Organising
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Section 10 · A Brief History
Indian Trade Union History — the Long View
  • 1860s onwards — early labour protests in Bombay textile mills, Bengal jute mills, Assam tea gardens
  • Bombay Mill-Hands Association (1884) under N.M. Lokhande — one of the earliest organised efforts
  • 1918 · Madras Labour Union (B.P. Wadia) — widely cited as India's first registered trade union
  • 1920 · All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) founded; Lala Lajpat Rai its first president
  • 1926 · Trade Unions Act — first legal recognition of unions and immunity from criminal conspiracy
  • 1929 · Meerut Conspiracy Case — mass arrest of communist labour organisers
  • 1947 · Industrial Disputes Act — the post-independence framework (still operative in much of the country)
Why this history shapes the present
Indian unions were forged in colonial textile mills, tea gardens, and railway workshops — large, concentrated, urban, formal-sector workplaces. The legal architecture and the union form both reflect that origin. As Indian work has shifted toward small establishments, contract labour, services, and platforms, unions designed for the textile mill have struggled to follow.
Major histories: Sukomal Sen, Working Class of India; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History (1989); Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India (1994); Janaki Nair on Bangalore textile workers.
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Section 10 · The Central Federations
Recognised Central Trade Union Organisations (CTUOs)
FederationFoundedPolitical affiliation (broadly)Approx. claimed strength
AITUC — All India Trade Union Congress1920CPI~14 million (last verified verification 2013)
INTUC — Indian National Trade Union Congress1947Indian National Congress~33 million (claim; verified figure lower)
HMS — Hind Mazdoor Sabha1948Socialist tradition; non-aligned now~9 million
BMS — Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh1955RSS-affiliated~17 million (largest by 2013 verified count)
CITU — Centre of Indian Trade Unions1970CPI(M)~6 million
AIUTUC, AICCTU, UTUC, LPF, SEWA, NFITUvariousvarioussmaller membership
Note on numbers: the last official verification of CTUO membership was 2013, after which several rounds were postponed or contested. Claimed strengths and verified figures diverge widely. Most central federations have declining active membership in the formal-sector industries that historically anchored them.
The 10 (now 11) big central unions coordinate on national strikes (most recent multi-CTUO general strike: 26 November 2020 against the labour codes). BMS typically does not join joint platforms with the others; CITU, AITUC, INTUC, HMS form the most consistent coalition.
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Section 10 · The SEWA Innovation
SEWA — Organising the Self-Employed
The Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), founded by Ela Bhatt in Ahmedabad in 1972, was the first major Indian organisation to argue that informal-sector workers — including the self-employed, home-based workers, vendors, hawkers — could be organised as workers under labour law. The model has reshaped how the Indian and international labour movement thinks about who counts as a worker.
  • Registered as a trade union in 1972 — a contested registration at the time
  • ~2.5 million members across multiple states (largest registered union of women workers in the world)
  • Organises vendors, agricultural labourers, garment workers, domestic workers, midwives, salt-pan workers
  • SEWA Bank — cooperative bank for women workers from 1974
  • SEWA influenced the ILO Home Work Convention (177, 1996) and the Domestic Workers Convention (189, 2011)
What SEWA changed conceptually
  • The self-employed worker has the same employment relationship problems as the wage worker — just with different counterparties
  • Unionisation is a form of worker self-organisation, not limited to wage-bargaining
  • Cooperative finance, child care, training, health insurance can all be union functions
  • The vendor on the street is a worker, not a small business; the home-based worker is a worker, not a hobbyist
  • Women's work, including unpaid care, is work — long before the term “care economy” was mainstream
Read: Ela Bhatt, We Are Poor But So Many (2006); Renana Jhabvala's extensive writing; SEWA Bharat's research outputs. SEWA's archive at WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing) is the best secondary source.
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Section 10 · New Forms, Old Problems
Newer Worker Organisations & Platforms
  • NDWM · National Domestic Workers Movement (1985, Sister Jeanne Devos)
  • NHF · National Hawkers Federation (1998)
  • NCC-CL · National Campaign Committee on Construction Labour
  • NTUI · New Trade Union Initiative (2006) — non-affiliated federation
  • IFAT · Indian Federation of App-Based Transport Workers (2020)
  • AIGWU · All India Gig Workers Union (2020, CITU-affiliated)
  • Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPWU)
  • Gig Workers Association (GIGWA, Bengaluru)
The recurring difficulties
  • Fragmented workforces across hundreds of small employers
  • Algorithmic management replacing identifiable supervisors
  • Contract-labour layering between worker and principal employer
  • Inter-state migrant workers under multiple jurisdictions
  • Weak enforcement of existing union rights (recognition disputes, victimisation of organisers)
  • Decline of large-establishment manufacturing where unions historically anchored
  • Hostile legal architecture in some states (e.g., 300-worker threshold for closure permission under IR Code)
Standing Conference of Public Enterprises and the Centre for Workers' Management have produced sustained empirical work on union density and bargaining outcomes. Newer research from Centre for Sustainable Employment (Azim Premji University) tracks platform worker organising in detail.
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Section 10 · Rural Worker Organising
MGNREGA Workers & Rural Labour Platforms
Rural agricultural and casual labour has historically been the hardest segment for trade unions to organise — dispersed workplaces, daily wages, dependence on local landlords, caste-shaped social control. MGNREGA (2005) created a new legal entitlement that became an organising platform.
  • NREGA Sangharsh Morcha — coalition demanding strict implementation
  • State-level networks: e.g., MKSS (Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan) in Rajasthan
  • SEWA, AIKS, AIAWU all active in rural labour mobilisation
  • Social audits as an organising tool — Andhra Pradesh model
  • Wage delays under MGNREGA as a continuing organising issue
  • Rural workers' demands have shaped MGNREGA rule revisions multiple times
What rural organising looks like in practice
  • Worker collective at the gram-panchayat level demanding wage payment
  • Right to Information petitions to track muster rolls and payment status
  • Social audit gram sabhas as accountability mechanism
  • State-level action against contractors and middlemen
  • Coordination with land-rights and forest-rights movements
The MKSS lineage: Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, Shankar Singh and others built MKSS in Devdoongri, Rajasthan in the early 1990s. The right-to-information movement and the right-to-work movement both grew out of this rural-labour organising tradition.
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Section 10 · What the Numbers Show
Industrial Conflict — the Long Decline
Recorded strike and lockout activity has declined sharply over four decades — both as a measure of worker assertion and as a sign of bargaining capacity. The pattern is similar across most large economies; the Indian story has additional features tied to the formal-informal shift.
  • 1970s · ~3,000+ strikes and lockouts per year on average
  • 1980s · Bombay textile strike (1982–83, ~2.5 lakh workers, Datta Samant) — effectively broke the textile mill workforce
  • 1990s onwards · sharp decline in strike activity; Labour Bureau records show numbers falling each decade
  • 2020s · recorded industrial disputes in low triple digits annually; many disputes now arise in unrecognised workplaces and don't enter the formal data
Why decline does not mean industrial peace
  • Formal-sector workforce share has shrunk — smaller base for recorded action
  • Contract labour now dominant in many large units — structurally hard to unionise
  • Lockouts and closures have replaced strikes as the dominant form of dispute resolution
  • Major flashpoints continue: Maruti Suzuki Manesar (2011–12), Toyota Bidadi (recurring), Wistron Karnataka (2020)
  • General strikes against labour codes (2020, 2022) drew tens of millions of participants per official claims
  • App-worker collective action (Swiggy, Zomato, Urban Company strikes 2020 onwards) is rising
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A Foundational Framing on Worker Power
"The labourer's standard of life depends on his bargaining power. The bargaining power of the labourer in turn depends on the strength of his organisation. Without the right to combine, the right to a fair wage is a fiction. The Indian worker, scattered, illiterate, and bound by debt, has historically had less of this power than almost any worker in the modern world."
— B.R. Ambedkar · as Labour Member, Viceroy's Executive Council, in remarks to Indian Labour Conference, 1942
The structural argument: wage levels and working conditions follow bargaining power, not market “productivity” in any clean sense. In a labour-surplus economy, individual workers have almost no bargaining power; collective bargaining is the only realistic counterweight. Weakening unions weakens the floor.
For practitioners: programmes that focus only on individual skilling, productivity, or entrepreneurship while ignoring collective bargaining work on one side of the equation. The other side — voice, organisation, legal protection — is where wage outcomes are actually determined.
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11
Section Eleven
Climate, Migration & Work in Transition
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Section 11 · The Heat Question
Heat Stress & Outdoor Work
Rising temperatures and longer heat seasons fall hardest on outdoor workers: agricultural labourers, construction workers, sanitation workers, street vendors, brick-kiln workers, transport workers. Most are informal, low-paid, and outside any heat-related legal protection. The ILO estimates substantial productivity losses from heat stress globally; Indian-specific work shows the burden concentrated by occupation, caste, and gender.
  • ILO (2019) · Working on a Warmer Planet — projected ~5.8% of total working hours lost in India by 2030 due to heat stress, primarily in agriculture and construction
  • Indian Council of Medical Research and AIIMS work on heatstroke mortality has documented sharp regional spikes
  • 2022 & 2024 heat seasons saw documented worker deaths in construction, agriculture, transport
  • Brick-kiln workers, primarily seasonal migrants, face year-on-year compounding exposure
The policy gap
  • No statutory heat-stress threshold for outdoor work in India
  • Limited state-level Heat Action Plans; Ahmedabad (2013, the first) and a handful of others
  • Most plans focus on acute mortality; few address worker compensation, work-hour adjustment, or income protection
  • OSH Code (2020) is silent on ambient heat as a hazard
  • Worker compensation for heat-related illness remains rare
CEEW, NRDC India, IIPH-Gandhinagar, and the Centre for Policy Research have produced systematic assessments. Sanitation worker heat exposure work by Praxis and Dalberg is among the most detailed sectoral studies.
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Section 11 · The Migration Engine
Internal Migration as Livelihood
Internal migration is the dominant form of livelihood diversification for poor rural households. Estimates vary because much migration is short-term and circular — not captured by Census conventions. The lockdown-induced reverse migration of 2020 forced this scale into national consciousness.
  • Census 2011 · ~454 million internal migrants by place of last residence (45% of population by some definitions)
  • Estimated short-duration / circular migrants: 60–100 million by various studies
  • Major source states: UP, Bihar, MP, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan
  • Major destination states: Maharashtra, Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala
  • 2020 lockdown · estimated 10–20 million workers attempted return; recorded deaths during return migration
  • Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act (1979) was on paper but rarely enforced before 2020
What 2020 changed (and what it didn't)
  • One Nation One Ration Card — portability rolled out, with implementation gaps
  • e-Shram database launched (2021) to register unorganised workers
  • State-level migrant cells set up in some destination states
  • Inter-state migrant worker protections still weak in IR Code framework
  • Source-state schemes (e.g., Bihar migration commission) underfunded
  • Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN) coalition continues policy work
Key references: Ravi Srivastava's body of work on internal migration; Working Group on Migration Report (2017); Priya Deshingkar and Shaheen Akter; the IIHS/Aajeevika Bureau migration tracking work.
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Section 11 · The Long Transition
The Indian Agrarian Transition — Where Workers Are Going
India is in a contested agrarian transition. Agriculture's GDP share has fallen below 20% (~17% in recent years) but employs 40%+ of the workforce. Workers are leaving agriculture but not entering modern manufacturing at the same pace; they are entering construction, low-end services, and casual work. This is not the East Asian textbook trajectory.
  • Agriculture share of employment has fallen from ~60% (early 1990s) to ~42–45% recently — with PLFS revisions
  • Manufacturing share of employment has been roughly flat at ~12% for two decades
  • Construction has absorbed the largest share of workers leaving agriculture
  • Services growth has been bifurcated — high-productivity (IT, finance) vs low-productivity (retail, transport, personal services)
  • The “missing manufacturing” debate: why has Indian manufacturing not absorbed more labour?
Why this matters for livelihoods policy
  • Workers leaving agriculture are not entering jobs with social security
  • Construction is high-injury, low-pay, weakly enforced
  • Distress agriculture — people staying in farming for lack of alternatives — depresses agricultural wages
  • Female workforce participation has fallen partly because women left farming faster than non-farm jobs opened up for them
  • Skilling for occupations that don't exist at scale produces frustrated graduates
Mehrotra & Parida, Ghose, Himanshu, Reetika Khera, Jayan Jose Thomas have all written on this transition. The Azim Premji University SoWI reports synthesise the empirical case.
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Section 11 · Just Transition
Just Transition — What the Term Means in Indian Practice
Just transition
A planned economic shift — usually away from fossil fuels and toward low-carbon production — that protects workers and communities from bearing disproportionate costs. The phrase originated in US trade union work in the 1970s/80s; was adopted in the ILO's 2015 Guidelines and the Paris Agreement preamble.
  • ~3 million workers directly and indirectly dependent on India's coal economy
  • Coal districts: Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, MP, Telangana, West Bengal
  • State governments derive significant revenue from coal royalties — transition has fiscal stakes
  • iFOREST, CSEP, and CSE have produced detailed coal-belt transition studies
  • National Just Transition Framework remains under discussion
What just transition needs to cover
  • Income support for displaced workers
  • Reskilling for workers who can transition
  • Community-level economic diversification, not only individual support
  • Particular attention to contract and informal workers (the majority in coal supply chains)
  • State revenue replacement strategies
  • Land restoration and post-mining livelihoods
  • Inclusion of women workers, who are systematically under-represented in formal coal employment but central to coal-dependent local economies
Just transition is not a euphemism for managed decline. Done right, it is one of the largest active labour-market policy challenges India faces over the next two decades.
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Section 11 · The Care Economy Frontier
Care Work — the Largest Hidden Sector
India's ageing population, rising female workforce participation in some segments, and growing demand for child and elder care position care work as one of the largest potential employment sectors over the coming decades. Most care work today is unpaid (overwhelmingly performed by women) or informal and underpaid (domestic workers, ASHA, anganwadi).
  • Time-use Survey 2019 · women perform ~7.2 hours of unpaid domestic and care work per day, men ~2.8
  • ~3 million ASHAs and anganwadi workers paid honoraria, not wages — long-running litigation on worker status
  • ~4 million domestic workers (likely under-count); covered by no specific national legislation
  • National Domestic Workers Movement, NTUI, and SEWA have organised in this sector
  • Domestic Workers Welfare Boards in some states, with limited reach
The double policy demand
  • Recognise unpaid care as work — in time-use surveys, social security, household statistics
  • Build public care infrastructure that releases women into paid work and supports those they previously cared for
  • Formalise paid care workers — ASHAs, anganwadi workers, domestic workers, elder care providers
  • Apply minimum wage and social security to paid care
  • Distribute care more equally within households
Indira Hirway, Diane Elson, and Nancy Folbre have done foundational care-economy work. Indian-specific: Ratna Sudarshan, Neetha N., Sona Mitra, the IWWAGE programme at IFMR LEAD.
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Section 11 · AI & the Indian Workforce
AI Exposure — What We Know & What We Don't
Generative AI's impact on Indian work is being studied in real time. Early findings suggest that the white-collar exposure pattern in India differs from Western economies in ways that matter for policy. India's IT-enabled services sector, software development, BPO, and clerical work are all in the high-exposure category.
  • ILO & Polish Economic Institute (2023): India among the most exposed of large economies because of large white-collar tradeable services
  • NASSCOM and industry estimates of IT services workforce restructuring vary widely
  • Coding, customer support, content moderation, junior legal/accounting work seeing the fastest tooling shifts
  • Lower-end manual occupations (drivers, construction, agricultural labour) less directly exposed in the short term
  • The displacement vs augmentation debate is empirically open in 2026
Where the real questions lie
  • Distribution: who captures productivity gains — workers, firms, consumers, capital owners?
  • Speed: how fast does deployment happen relative to retraining and redeployment?
  • Wage compression: does AI flatten internal wage structures within firms?
  • Skill obsolescence: how do mid-career workers adapt without strong adult-learning systems?
  • Bargaining: can unions and worker associations contest the terms of deployment?
For development practitioners: AI is not a future risk; it is a present labour-market dynamic that will shape skilling, social protection, and labour-law reform priorities for the rest of this decade.
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Section 11 · The ILO Frame
The Decent Work Agenda
Decent Work (ILO, 1999)
Productive work for women and men in conditions of freedom, equity, security, and human dignity. Operationalised through four pillars: employment creation; rights at work; social protection; social dialogue. Adopted as an organising frame in SDG 8 (2015).
  • SDG 8 · Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
  • SDG 5.4 · Recognise and value unpaid care and domestic work
  • SDG 1.3 · Implement nationally appropriate social protection systems for all
  • SDG 10.4 · Adopt fiscal, wage and social protection policies, and progressively achieve greater equality
India's Decent Work Country Programmes
  • Multiple cycles since 2007; current cycle 2023–27 with Government, employers, workers as tripartite signatories
  • Key priorities: formalisation of informal employment; social protection coverage; women's workforce participation; decent work for migrant workers
  • ILO produces annual implementation reviews; reports available at ilo.org
  • India has ratified 6 of 8 ILO core labour standards (not freedom of association/collective bargaining conventions 87 and 98)
  • Has ratified all 4 fundamental occupational safety conventions (after 2022 ILO addition)
India's non-ratification of Conventions 87 and 98 is a long-standing point of international labour-law contention. The country's domestic framework includes most of the substantive protections; the formal ratification gap is itself a policy choice.
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A Closing Frame on Work in Transition
"The most basic question of any economic system is whether it produces decent work. By that measure, India's recent growth has under-performed: incomes have risen, but the share of workers with secure employment, written contracts, social security, and a living wage has not kept pace. Closing that gap is the central labour-market challenge of the next two decades."
— a working synthesis from State of Working India reports (Azim Premji University, 2018, 2021, 2023, 2024) and ILO Decent Work data
What May Day asks of us: labour day commemorates the eight-hour workday won through the Haymarket struggle and the global movement for worker dignity. The Indian commemoration on 1 May (since 1923, in Madras under M. Singaravelu Chettiar) connects to that tradition. The work is not finished. Most Indian workers still do not have an enforced eight-hour day, paid overtime, written contracts, or social security.
For practitioners: work, labour, and livelihoods sit at the intersection of every other development question — gender, caste, climate, education, health, finance. Caring about any of those means caring about the conditions under which Indians actually earn their living. There is no development without decent work.
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12
Section Twelve
Further Reading & Resources
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Section 12 · Primary Data Sources
Where the Numbers Come From
Indian official sources
  • PLFS · Periodic Labour Force Survey, MoSPI (annual since 2017–18); successor to NSSO EUS rounds
  • NSSO EUS · Employment-Unemployment Survey rounds 1972–73 to 2011–12 — the long historical series
  • Census of India · decennial; main worker / marginal worker classification; migration tables
  • Time Use Survey 2019 · first nationwide TUS by MoSPI; care economy data
  • Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) · manufacturing establishments
  • Labour Bureau · CPI-IW, wage and price data, industrial dispute statistics
  • EPFO · payroll data on formal employment
  • e-Shram portal · unorganised worker registration database
Independent & international sources
  • CMIE · Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, Consumer Pyramids Household Survey, monthly unemployment estimates
  • State of Working India reports · Azim Premji University CSE (2018, 2021, 2023, 2024)
  • India Employment Reports · ILO & IHD (2024 was the latest in this series)
  • ILO World Employment and Social Outlook · annual
  • ILOSTAT · comparable cross-country labour data
  • WIEGO · informal employment data and statistics
  • India Working Survey (IWS) · Azim Premji University
  • IHDS · India Human Development Survey, NCAER & Maryland
A note on data quality: Indian labour statistics carry well-known uncertainties. Different sources use different reference periods (usual status, current weekly status, current daily status) and produce systematically different LFPR and unemployment estimates. Always check the specific definition before comparing numbers across sources.
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Section 12 · Reading List: Livelihoods
Foundational & Contemporary Reading on Livelihoods
Framework & classics
  • Robert Chambers & Gordon Conway — Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Practical Concepts for the 21st Century (IDS Discussion Paper 296, 1991)
  • DFID — Sustainable Livelihoods Guidance Sheets (1999–2001)
  • Ian Scoones — Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: A Framework for Analysis (IDS WP 72, 1998)
  • Ian Scoones — Livelihoods Perspectives and Rural Development (J. Peasant Studies, 2009) — the critical retrospective
  • Frank Ellis — Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries (2000)
  • Amartya Sen — Poverty and Famines (1981); Development as Freedom (1999) — the entitlements / capability link
  • Robert Chambers — Whose Reality Counts? (1997)
Indian rural livelihoods
  • Jean Drèze & Amartya Sen — India: Development and Participation (2002)
  • Stuart Corbridge, Sarah Williams, Manoj Srivastava, René Véron — Seeing the State (2005)
  • P. Sainath — Everybody Loves a Good Drought (1996); ongoing PARI work
  • Jan Breman — Footloose Labour (1996); The Poverty Regime in Village India (2007)
  • Reetika Khera — The Battle for Employment Guarantee (2011)
  • ICRISAT VLS & VDSA studies; CESS Hyderabad agrarian work
  • Aajeevika Bureau studies on circular migration
  • SEWA Bharat publications
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Section 12 · Reading List: Labour
Foundational & Contemporary Reading on Labour
Indian labour studies
  • Jan Breman — Outcast Labour in Asia (2010); Capitalism, Inequality and Labour in India (2019)
  • Barbara Harriss-White — India Working (2003); Rural Commercial Capital (2008)
  • Ravi Srivastava — multiple works on internal migration and informal employment
  • Jayati Ghosh — Never Done and Poorly Paid (2009); ongoing work on women's work
  • Naila Kabeer — Reversed Realities; multiple papers on women's economic empowerment in South Asia
  • Indrani Mazumdar — Women Workers and Globalization (2007)
  • K.P. Kannan — Wages and Small-Scale Industries in Kerala; NCEUS reports
  • Sharit Bhowmik — Street Vendors in the Global Urban Economy
International labour theory
  • W. Arthur Lewis — “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour” (1954) — the foundational dual-economy paper
  • Guy Standing — The Precariat (2011)
  • Saskia Sassen — The Global City (1991)
  • Beverly Silver — Forces of Labor (2003)
  • Marta Russell — on disability and the labour market
  • Branko Milanovic — Capitalism, Alone (2019)
  • Ha-Joon Chang — Bad Samaritans (2008) on industrial policy
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Section 12 · Glossary, Part 1
Working Glossary — Core Definitions
TermWorking definition
Work (ICLS-19)Any activity to produce goods or services for use by others or own use; five forms including employment, own-use production, volunteer, unpaid trainee, other
LFPRLabour Force Participation Rate — share of population that is either working or seeking work; reference period varies by definition
WPRWorker Population Ratio — share of population that is working
URUnemployment Rate — share of labour force that is seeking but not finding work
Usual StatusReference period of 365 days; PS = principal status, SS = subsidiary status
CWS / CDSCurrent Weekly Status / Current Daily Status — shorter reference periods, capture more underemployment
Informal employmentEmployment without written contract, social security, or paid leave; ~85–90% of Indian employment
Unorganised sectorEstablishments with fewer than 10 (sometimes 20) workers and no formal record-keeping; broader than informal
SLFSustainable Livelihoods Framework — Chambers & Conway (1991), elaborated by DFID; analyses livelihoods through five capitals against vulnerability context
Five capitalsHuman, social, natural, physical, financial — the asset base households draw on for livelihoods
MGNREGAMahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005; 100 days of guaranteed wage employment per rural household per year
e-ShramNational database of unorganised workers, launched 2021; over 30 crore registrations to date
Living wageWage adequate to meet a worker's basic needs and those of dependents; distinct from minimum wage; India does not have a statutory living wage definition
Decent workILO 1999 concept — productive work in conditions of freedom, equity, security, human dignity; four pillars include employment, rights, protection, dialogue
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Section 12 · Glossary, Part 2
Glossary — Indian Legal & Policy Terms
TermWorking definition
ID ActIndustrial Disputes Act, 1947 — framework for industrial disputes, layoffs, closures; threshold of 100 workers for closure permission, raised to 300 in IR Code
Code on Wages, 2019Consolidates Minimum Wages, Payment of Wages, Payment of Bonus, Equal Remuneration Acts; statutory floor wage; not yet fully operational in 2026
IR Code, 2020Industrial Relations Code; replaces Trade Unions Act, ID Act, Standing Orders Act; raises closure thresholds; modifies fixed-term employment provisions
OSH Code, 2020Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code; consolidates 13 earlier laws including Factories Act
SS Code, 2020Code on Social Security; consolidates EPF, ESI, gratuity, maternity, employee compensation; extends partial coverage to gig and platform workers (a first)
EPFO / ESICEmployees' Provident Fund Organisation; Employees' State Insurance Corporation — the two main contributory schemes
NCEUSNational Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (Arjun Sengupta); produced major reports 2007–09
Aggregator / platform workerSS Code definitions; persons engaged by platforms or aggregators outside traditional employer-employee relationship
Bonded labourForced labour against advance payment of debt; abolished by Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976; persistent enforcement gaps
Contract labourWorker employed through a contractor for a principal employer; covered by Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970
State Welfare BoardsTripartite boards under specific laws (e.g., BOCW Act for construction workers) collecting cess and providing welfare benefits
Just transitionPlanned economic shift away from fossil fuels that protects workers and communities from disproportionate transition costs; ILO 2015 Guidelines
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Section 12 · Cross-References
Where to Continue Within ImpactMojo
Flagship
Development Economics 101
Theoretical foundations: Lewis, Sen on capability, structural transformation, Indian growth story. The macro context for everything in this deck.
Flagship
Politics of Aspiration 101
NREGA, NFSA, RTI, Forest Rights — the rights-based welfare architecture that the labour and livelihoods debate sits within.
Flagship
MEL Basics 101
For practitioners designing labour-market or livelihoods programmes — ToC, indicator design, evaluation methods, Excel and Colab labs.
101 Series
Caste Studies 101
Caste and the labour market, occupational closure, wage discrimination, manual scavenging, reservation in employment. Companion deck.
101 Series
Inequality Basics 101
Wage shares, capital vs labour, top-end concentration; the inequality numbers behind the Indian labour story.
101 Series
Public Health Basics 101
Worker health, occupational hazards, ESIC scheme, the public health side of decent work.
Full ImpactMojo course catalogue: www.impactmojo.in. The 101 Series hub: 101.impactmojo.in. All decks are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; share with anyone who would benefit. The 101 Series is being expanded through 2026 across roughly 35 topics.
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A Closing Frame
"The first condition of success for the labouring classes is to organise. Without organisation, the worker is at the mercy of the employer, the contractor, the moneylender, and the landlord — all of whom have organisations of their own. The struggle for fair wages, decent hours, safe work, and security against old age and sickness has always been won by workers acting together, and lost by workers acting alone."
— Ela Bhatt, founder of SEWA · recalled in We Are Poor But So Many (2006)
Why this deck exists: India's labour and livelihoods question is large enough, complex enough, and consequential enough that no practitioner working on development in South Asia can afford a thin grasp of it. Caste is here. Gender is here. Climate is here. Constitution is here. Every other 101 deck connects back to this one.
For 1 May: the Indian May Day tradition begins in Madras in 1923 under M. Singaravelu Chettiar. A century on, the work the labour movement set out to do — an enforced eight-hour day, a living wage, social security, the right to organise — remains unfinished for the vast majority of Indian workers. That is the agenda this deck has tried to map.
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Thank
You
If this deck helped you teach, learn, or work better on questions of work, labour, and livelihoods, share it with a colleague who would benefit.
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