Supporting India’s Unorganised Workforce During the Lockdown

As days, weeks and months have passed since India’s first novel coronavirus (nCoV) case identified on 30-Jan, the country has progressively moved from safety advisories issued by Union and state governments to restricting travel internationally and domestically, to  voluntary nationwide curfew suggested by the Prime Minister, to declaring a weeks-long lockdown of the country.

While doctors, United Nations and World Health Organisation supported the lockdown, bringing the country (barring essential services) to a halt has extracted its economic price from all layers of society, even as the lockdown has succeeded in slowing down the spread of the virus across the length and breadth of the country.

High level dynamics of India’s unorganised workforce

India has an estimated workforce of about 50 crores (500 million), of which over 70% (Table 1.1) (35 crores/350 million) are believed to work in the unorganised sector (including the self-employed). These include a wide spectrum of categories such as daily wage labourers, smaller farmers, artisans, weavers, street vendors, tailors, those employing under ten people. Many of these categories and members within get employment opportunities in seasonal cycles. An added dimension in this complex matrix of categories, their respective employment strengths, employment cycles and uneven spread across the country is that many members of the unorganised sector are migrant workers – they may be longer term or short-term migrants, and may have travelled varying distances from any part of India to any other part in search of employment.

The Challenge of Quantifying the Adverse Impact of the Lockdown

Governments need to ensure basic employment-related needs of the entire workforce with a country’s legal framework. However, the responsibilities of the government acquire an added daunting dimension during a crisis of the seriousness and magnitude as the one India and much of the world is in the midst of. Countless people among India’s huge workforce have been impacted in a variety of ways since the Union government declared a nationwide lockdown. Some may continue to work (being part of essential services), but even as they step out every day to earn their livelihood, they would be exposing themselves to the dreaded infection. Others who do not have opportunities to work at all during this period will likely consider the previous category as fortunate. Then there would be others who would’ve travelled in search of seasonal or longer-term employment opportunities and would suddenly find themselves unemployed and unable to sustain themselves in urban India.

When a government at national or state level is compelled to impose a lockdown, it needs to support the people impacted by the decision. But how does it even figure out how many people in which state, district or city need support, and in which form? And how does it effectively extend support to all impacted individuals without being able to quantify the situation?

The crisis is new to literally every government in the world. Even as they have inputs flowing in continuously from multiple directions and from different levels, governments need to interpret them to the best of their ability and take broad decisions – balancing between need for urgent decision-making and the cost of delaying them for want of updated insights – which will impact different sections of society, as well as individuals, to varying extents, both positively and negatively.

While the lockdown has protected a very large number of Indians from getting infected with NCoV, the economic impact has been a blow to countless families and individuals. Sections of India have been unsparing in their attacks on the Union government on terms of the impact of the lockdown on underprivileged sections of society, as well as the government’s “failure” to support them. Undoubtedly daily wagers of all kinds have lost their means of livelihood, migrant workers are stranded perhaps hundreds of kms from their homes with no means to sustain where they are and no means to return to their homes, many kinds of small and large businesses have come to a halt.

India’s workforce – The fortunate, less fortunate and the least fortunate

Members of the workforce in a position to work from home in spite of the lockdown are clearly the most fortunate. Staying at home is not exposing them to the infection, and they have a feeling of security as well as a sense of purpose when they wake up every morning. The ones working outside the protection of their homes are less fortunate but are driven by a sense of social responsibility or financial compulsion. The ones who are fit enough to work but not in a position to work from home must be restless, and anxious about their job security. Then there are those who are at home without any means to earn. Perhaps the worst off are those with no sources of income, living in a part of India which isn’t there home.

The decision taken by the Union government to impose a 3-week lockdown could not have been taken on impulse. It would have been thought through over some time, with the government choosing to familiarise India’s vast population with a 12-hour self-imposed curfew first. However, when a decision as sweeping as a nationwide lockdown in a country the size of India is taken even after weeks of planning, government support across sections of society will inevitably fall short of adequate. There have been news reports of migrant workers having been stranded in large cities, of no work for daily wagers, leading to inability to buy food, and even of some migrants commencing the unimaginably long walk from the national capital region (NCR) or Mumbai to distant districts in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. While sections of the media chose to interview one or more groups of people who had commenced the journey of hundreds of kilometres by foot, media chose not to set proper context for such news, such as how many people among all migrant workers in urban India have decided to walk back home, and how many migrant workers had chosen to stay back put. However, these figures seem to have been declared by the government based on petitions filed in the Supreme Court.

What has the government done for the impacted members of the workforce?

Selective reportage notwithstanding, governments at national and state levels have health and worsening humanitarian crises at hand. If daily wagers (migrants or otherwise) don’t have opportunities to earn, it’ll lead to starvation, even social unrest. Fortunately the Union government seems to have quickly prioritised extending support to the most impacted sections of the workforce – if this report is accurate, a database would have been set up already to arrive at the numbers of impacted migrant workers, identify means of supporting them and the nature of support they could require. The government also proposes to use this database to understand migration patterns as well as population by nature of employment. Very importantly, the database will also capture bank account details of the migrant workers.

In addition to building this database from data sourced from state governments, employers and non-governmental organisations, the Union government is also taking inputs directly from migrant workers, including where they are stranded and their skillsets.

While the pandemic has been the trigger for this database to be constructed, even before it hit India the Union government had commenced the construction of a database of India’s unorganised workforce members (governments in the past would have done well to invest in setting up such a database perhaps as much as a quarter century ago – it would have served several purposes over the years, such as helping support impacted members of the populace during natural calamities, as well as during the present crisis). The post-NCoV database will undoubtedly be married with the longer-term initiative the government commenced work on early this year, to build an enriched database of India’s unorganised workforce.

As of April 2018, 80% Indians had bank accounts, of which over 38 crore (380 million) were opened since 2014 under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana. The latter category is already used to transfer monetary benefits to account holders. This information, combined with the consolidated unorganised workforce database, can form the lifeline the unemployed workforce needs during the lockdown and beyond, if required.

Since a few months much has been said about a sputtering economy and the government’s need to focus on reviving it. That notwithstanding, the government has had to readjust its priorities and support a lockdown-battered economy and countless impacted people of India. It came first in the form of food subsidy announced in late March. A couple of days later the government announced a ₨ 1.7 lakh crores package. It is not clear whether the subsidy announced days earlier is part of the package announced by the Finance Ministry, or separate.

Transfer of funds has already commenced – partly from the Union government’s package and partly from state governments. In addition, the government also announced relief for smaller entities in the organised sector. Last month the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) too announced some relief for the strained financial sector. The attempt is to reach out to each impacted section of the workforce – organised or unorganised.

In addition to these measures, known and unknown Indians have contributed to the PM CARES Fund. Not just these, countless people have reached out to support the less fortunate around them. Will all of these relief packages, contributions and human to human support be sufficient? The answer will not be hard to guess. But it’s important to remind ourselves how everyone from governments, to conglomerates, to smaller enterprises to individuals are stretching themselves to reduce the total adverse impacts of the lockdown.

What lessons should governments imbibe?

I have articulated in the past that Aadhaar could be the Brahmastra (can’t resist calling it so after watching two episodes of Mahabharat a day since weeks) for planning and implementing social initiatives in future. While a previous government must be credited for sowing the seed of the unique identifier, the present one has done well to invest heavily in it. According to the government, over 94% Indians already have Aadhaar cards. It’s but natural that the database of the unorganised sector’s workforce too contains it.

One hopes that a situation such as the present pandemic never occurs again in any country, but this situation has presented before the government an opportunity – perhaps a necessity – for the database of unorganised workforce members to be married with Aadhaar-related information. The resulting database could progressively be enriched to contain data on each unorganised sector member’s address, skills, migration attributes (seasonal or longer, likely destinations, etc), and more. One needs to acknowledge though that attributes such as destinations of migrant workers, as well as duration of stay are dynamic and having up-to-date data on all these attributes will be an ambitious initiative in itself. Even without updated data for each individual, should a calamity or worse strike, the government will be better placed than two months ago to understand the approximate number of people needing support, the kind of support, where they are located and how far they are from their homes. Yet again though one hopes that the situation to use such a database for providing relief never arises again.