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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Work Balance? by Pragya Singh

Casual work, self-employment still rule

Q&A

Why are fewer women working?
Education schemes and higher wages of men are keeping them home for longer.

Why is casual work growing?
The biggest employment scheme, NREGA, employs casual workers.

Why is self-employment down?
The least-paying jobs in the self-employment sector are worse than NREGA entitlements.

***

The latest official figures on employment say this: a typical Indian worker is male, starts working in his mid-20s, is presumably better educated than before, yet most likely to find work as casual labour—the least secure of jobs. He is also more likely to get a job, less likely to be interested in one, and will surely earn better money. His wife is less likely to work.

This is just the sort of image that the government cautions observers not to paint, pointing to the formidable armies of the self-employed—those who polish your shoes, sell you roadside tea, and build a dhaba or a mechanic’s shop—in the workforce. But be it the “casual” workers or the self-employed, these are not the big, sweeping changes that one expects to see 20 years after a big country starts liberalising. Sadly, the proportion of Indians in manufacturing jobs hasn’t changed significantly since the ’90s.

Professor T.C.A. Anant, the chief statistician of India, says the spike in casual labour—a rather notable trend—may be because of the employment guarantee scheme NREGA pulling people back from a mid-2000s rise in the trend of self-employment. “At the bottom end, self-employment is worse than casual labour,” says Anant. “Many a shoe-polisher or paan shop owner will also prefer nregs to the disguised unemployment typical of India until the 1990s.”

The new numbers have far more paradoxes to offer, though. For example, the overall unemployment rate has gone down. As has the work participation ratio, meaning that fewer people are joining the workforce, and especially fewer women under 25. “Women may be living off the wages of men, whose incomes seem to have risen,” says Manish Sabharwal, who runs Teamlease, a temporary staffing company. But all in all, wages have risen significantly across vocation and region over the last five-odd years until 2009-10. This may explain why, though job creation has definitely slowed, it’s not showing up as mass distress.

Also, if you add the latest total number of employed and unemployed people, and divide the total population by this sum, you get a lower figure than five years ago. This means the total supply of labour has reduced. This explains why wages are rising instead of falling, but it leaves many guessing why there’s a spike in employment for men over 25—what are they doing until then? Awaiting greener pastures is one explanation.

Unfortunately, casual labour is India’s top job option. This, says Sabharwal, is what worries him most. “I’m concerned about the high number of casual workers—45 per cent; it shouldn’t be more than five per cent,” he says. “Casual employment implies the least income, benefits, job security and skills.” What’s equally surprising is that other than a short period in the mid-2000s, when there was a spurt in self-employment, India has barely changed the mix of who works where—manufacturing, self-employed or casual workers—since the ’90s.

“There is very little advantage for anyone to be engaged in the unorganised sector or to hire unorganised labour,” says Rituparna Chakraborty, who is a trustee at the Indian Staffing Federation, a grouping of head-hunters. “Most people would like to leave at the first available opportunity,” she says. If only those options, or the right skills for manufacturing, existed.

And as for women, even fewer work today, perhaps because they’re studying more. Prof Anant points to the Right to Education Act and Mid-Day Meal Scheme and higher enrolments despite high dropouts. Whatever picture observers finally end up conjuring, it’s apparent that the rate of growth of employment has dipped, and fewer women are working. This can only be unhappy news.