The Status of Self-Employed and Casual Workers in India

During the last fifty years during 1972 to 2022, the overall workforce participation rate (WPR) in India has stagnated at around 41% but the female WPR has not only been around half of males, it has also declined by 2 percentage points. The average annual growth rate in employment has just been equal to 1.75%, though similar to that of population (1.8%). However, most of the labour has been employed in labour intensive sectors of agriculture and construction mainly as self-employed workers or casual labour. In India, the share of self-employed in total employment in 2022–23 is 57% and another 22% are casual workers. The share of regular workers is thus only 21%. India, has a lot of workers in the informal sector without any social security. These workers are the most vulnerable in any catastrophe. As a result, these self-employed, and casual workers were and still are the worst sufferers of any catastrophe, e.g. COVID-19 (Aggarwal, 2023b). They lost their occupations, and jobs due to severe economic lock downs and restrictions. They did not have alternative employment opportunities. Many of these workers who lost their jobs migrated to rural areas where many took employment under NREGA. Most workers did not get adequate financial support from the governments and were forced to take up self-employment for their survival. During COVID, not only the headcount employment fell but workers worked for less number of days per week and also for less number of hours per day. Government took few initiatives but they were perhaps not enough. Some more policy initiatives have been recently undertaken in India to increase the formalization of the economy and provide some social security to the workers through changes in the labour laws. The chapter aims to put the status of self-employed and casual workers in perspective. It first provides the brief profile of these workers in India during 1972–2022. Then the chapter identifies the total loss in employment by the workers during COVID-19, and gives an overview of the policy initiatives which were taken to help the workers during COVID-19. Based on the outcome of the evidence, some policy recommendations have been made to improve the work condition of the workers.