Looking to the shadows

They work in almost every conceivable situation, along with their entire families. They do agricultural labour in season, and are artisans, head-loaders and construction workers. They sweat in brick-kilns and quarries, glass- or brassware operations. They toil for far more than eight hours at a stretch, yet they do not have the luxury of either weekend holidays or social-security benefits. They number around 300 million, yet they are not part of any organised system of work. They constitute the bulk of the workforce in independent India but are rarely written about. They are not on any list, register or muster roll. They are the anonymous contributors to the national income. They are, in short, the survivors of the other India at work – invisible to the glitzy, high-tech environs of the new India-on-the-move. Unorganised-sector workers contribute nearly 45 percent of the national income, and produce nearly 40 percent of industrial products. And their ranks are growing, in accordance with the omnipresent emphasis on short-term contractual employment.

According to the National Sample Survey Organisation report of 1999-2000, workers in the unorganised sector in India total 369 million; the corresponding figure in the organised sector is just 28 million. Within this category of unorganised work, those employed in agriculture take the lion's share at 237 million; construction numbers 17 million; manufacturing activities, 41 million; and 37 million each in trade and transport, and communication and services.