Contingent social security schemes for unorganised workers in India

Working paper 4 of The long road to social security

Tags: India , Civil Society Building
Additional tags: Unorganised workers , Social security

As per the estimates provided by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS), the unorganised workers constitute 92.37 percent of the Indian workforce – out of which, 86.01 percent eke out their living by performing various activities related to the unorganised sector whereas 6.36 percent work as unorganised workers in the organised segment. Exposure to various vulnerabilities is the common plight of these workers.

Lack of access to social security benefits especially the contingent social security to such large chunk of the Indian workforce has been the major factor that played a large role in the intensification of the vulnerability experience among these workers. So, in order to mitigate their plight, there has been an emerging concern among the researchers. They have argued for extending the (contingent) social security cover to the unorganised workers. But, at the Government side, the effort remained largely confined to the provision of old age pension, etc. to the households living below the poverty line. There has been no major intervention by the Central Government till the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government assumed its office in 2004, who, in order to fulfill its electoral commitments, has enacted (in 2005) a legislation aimed at the provision of employment guarantee to the rural households. It has also enacted another legislation in 2008 to provide social security to the unorganised workers. Besides these Central-level initiatives, some states have already made efforts to provide contingent social security to unorganised workers through the enactment of various Acts, creation of welfare funds and the initiation of social security schemes.

This inventory on contingent social security aims at documenting these initiatives undertaken by the Centre and the States. While doing so, it elaborates on the nature and status of various measures undertaken by them. It is also worth mentioning that while preparing this inventory, we have taken care of including both the legislations (that enforce constitutional commitment) and the schemes (that sometimes may have transitional character) so as to have a comprehensive stock of all sorts of measures undertaken by the Government to mitigate the plight of unorganised workers.

This inventory has two main parts: the first part elaborates on the national-level Acts and schemes and the second part describes the schemes undertaken by various states.