Women Home Based Workers Across Indian States: Recent Evidences

Globalisation has introduced a system of production where flexible work contract or sub-contracting and ‘putting-out’ system of production is becoming a general practice. Either as cost reduction strategy or as businesses strategy production is being out sourced and consequently a set of workers have emerged which is known as ‘home based workers (HBW)’ or ‘home workers’ or ‘outworkers’. NCEUS (2007) highlighted the importance of estimating and knowing the conditions of work of home workers. Information about these home based workers has been limited till recently due to definitional issues and data limitations. Delhi Group has clarified many definitional issues and NSS 66th round, (2009-10) has provided relevant data to know details of these home based workers. This paper focuses on women home based workers as they constitute the largest part and are characterised by worst employment conditions. NSS has launched another round (68th) of unemployment-employment survey for year 2011-12, still 66th round is much more important in regard to home based workers due to the fact that 68th round has dropped many of question on sub-contracting. Therefore, this paper relies on 66th round data only. This paper is basically an attempt to look at state wise pattern in women home based workers. It shows that there are considerable state level variations. There is state like Assam with close to half and Punjab with slightly above 10 per cent of their women home based workers working under any form of subcontracting. This paper looks at industrial distribution of these women home based workers and it is shown that there are certain industrial groups where share of home based women workers is higher than non home based workers. Thus we have fair reason to agree with NCEUS (2007) that these workers are a special category and they need specific policies to redress their situation.