Mobility and Threshold Social Security

Migrants predominantly work in the unorganised sector which employs over 90% of the workforce and is characterised by low earnings, informal contracts, insecure jobs, fluctuations in employment, poor working conditions and low level of social security, resulting in extremely poor living standards and precarity for its workers. The social policy in India too has followed the dichotomy of organised and unorganised sector by developing a dual system of social security—a comprehensive, portable social security for organised sector employees who usually have regular salaried jobs and a minimalist social security for unorganised sector workers who are the most vulnerable groups—socially as well as economically. Building upon the ILO Social Protection Floor recommendation, the paper argues for reimagining social security as an intervention to make drastic improvements in the living standard of the entire workforce of India. It highlights three weaknesses in the existing social security system—one, they are based on a reductionist package of social insurance and social assistance; two, they lack a threshold push to make a real change in the lives of beneficiaries and three, the prevailing policy environment seeks to keep workers in abominable conditions in the name of expanding employment opportunities. However, both high as well as some low-income countries have shown that social security can be successfully used to uplift the living standard of vast majority of masses. Rather than treating growth and social security as binaries, a developing country like India, the paper argues, needs to make departure from the growth objectives it has hitherto followed and invest massively into people’s lives. To overcome the historic weaknesses of social security programmes in India, the gap between formal and informal sector must be minimised. The paper strongly argues for making Employees Provident Fund (EPF) and Employees State Insurance (ESI)—the two flagship programmes designed for the organised sector—universal social security programmes in India. This would require work at several levels—right from working out technical details, registration of a very unstable workforce, finding resources and bringing similar initiatives by a host of public actors under a common ‘threshold’ framework. The paper also recognises the need for other securities that can be derived from schemes and programmes related to food and nutrition security; work security in rural and urban areas; cash support; and improvement in housing, surrounding settlement and workplace; and call for combining these with universal EPF and ESI, is termed by the authors as ‘threshold security’. For migrants, all social security programmes and schemes must have an inbuilt portability clause. This would require investing into technology platforms, overcoming exclusions created by the requirements of domicile, adhering to the principle of non-discrimination and equal citizenship, recognising the contributions made by migrants in the growth and development of the country, and amending the basic design of some crucial funds for inter-state portability of resources so that they finally reach the workers.