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The COVID‐19 crisis has translated into an unprecedented humanitarian crisis for the poor and marginalized groups in society. The countrywide lockdowns, quarantine measures, and mobility restrictions across 200 countries of the world have resulted in a host of negative manifestations for women. There have been unprecedented losses in the informal economy, which is dominated by women. Some scholars also contend that the pandemic will translate into heightened burden of unpaid domestic work, loss of economic autonomy and disruption to maternal health services. Despite these factors a gendered perspective is absent in the policy response to this crisis. It is against this background that the present paper employed a feminist intersectionality lens to conduct participatory field based research on the lived experiences of women in informal employment in Indian Punjab during the COVID‐19 crisis. The research unearthed the specific pathways through which existing socio‐economic inequities rooted in caste, class and occupational entities magnify the vulnerabilities experienced by women during such a health crisis. The research offers a contextualized framework for understanding the gendered impacts of the crisis. It also highlights the urgency of taking account of gender specific constraints during the health crisis so as to institute robust, effective and equitable policy interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a traumatic lockdown in 2020, India's migrant factory workers have headed back to work and on worse terms than before. Struggling with new levels of denial of entitlements, workers respond by withdrawing from their fragile hold on formality, moving instead further into the informal sector. Based on voice notes recorded on Saajha Manch, a phone‐based community media platform, the paper examines workers' experience that their efforts to claim their rights lure them into a quagmire in a bureaucracy which sucks their energy while assuring no clear outcome. Seeing evidence of failed enforcement and structural inequality all around them, workers conclude that the law is not meant for them and hence show little interest in the new labour codes hastily enacted at the height of the pandemic. The paper highlights the dysfunction of the formal sector in delivering to its low‐waged workers who remain unserved in spite of registration and documentation in place. As they join the ranks of informality, however, migrant factory workers do not lose interest in associative and contentious activity. On the contrary, freedom from the bureaucracy of rights may be a boost to new forms of struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extension of social protection to all has become a central policy objective, both nationally and internationally. A considerable number of middle- and low-income countries have undertaken substantial efforts to extend social protection, while the international community reaffirmed its commitment to the extension of social protection through the adoption of the ILO Recommendation concerning National Floors of Social Protection, No. 202 (2012). This article reviews the legal provisions and the implementation of the Indian Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), legislated in 2005, and does so in the light of the more recent provisions of ILO Recommendation No. 202. Since its introduction ten years ago, MGNREGA has provided a source of income to rural workers, increased wage rates, achieved high female participation rates and created durable assets. India's local governance bodies, Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRI), have been empowered and involved in the processes of planning and monitoring. However, despite successes, there have been considerable shortcomings in implementation. This article highlights two central themes: first, the innovative policy framework of the Act, which brings together rights-based entitlements, demand-driven employment, and citizen-centred monitoring. Second, it assesses the accessibility and adequacy of benefits in the implementation of MGNREGA. We conclude that MGNREGA offers potential for South-South learning, both in terms of policy-design and implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's demographic trends portend moderately rapid ageing of the population. This, combined with the limited coverage of pension and health care programmes in terms of population, types of risks covered, and benefit levels has led to greater urgency in extending the coverage and reform directions of the current pension and health care programmes. This article analyses three pension and health care initiatives in India directed at the workers and their families engaged in the informal sector. The first initiative, India's National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP), undertaken in 1995 provides budget-financed transfers targeted at older persons. It is funded by the Union government but implemented by the state governments. The second initiative, called Swavalamban, was started in 2010, but has been subsumed under Atal Pension Yojana (APY), in the 2015-16 budget. Both are voluntary co-contributory initiatives aimed at providing access to retirement income to low-income individuals (government co-contributing with the individual). Unlike Swavalamban, the APY initiative has provisions for minimum guaranteed pension benefits, with contributions required by the members adjusted accordingly. Effectiveness in increasing enrollment and in sustaining contributions over a longer period will impact on the extent of retirement income security obtained by the members. The third initiative, Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), is insurance-based and aims to provide hospital care to low-income households. The article argues that for improving outcomes of these initiatives, more effective implementation, greater fiscal resources, and an integrated and systemic approach which is aided by technology-enabled platforms such as Aadhaar, will be needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My essay[This paper] focuses on the marginalised people whose livelihoods depend on gathering, sorting, transporting and selling garbage in India's huge informal economy, livelihoods now challenged as municipal governments contract the recycling of waste to corporations. The evolving, bumpy geography of the waste economy creates permanent border areas of primitive accumulation and both devalorised and valorised people and places. I make a case for understanding informal sector activities, such as the work of transforming the city's detritus, as part of a vast infra-economy and the varied forms of labour performed within heterogeneous value chains of waste transformation as infrastructural labour that produces what Marx called capital's 'general' and 'external' conditions of production. Through close examination of the spatiotemporal lattice of informal municipal solid waste recycling, I demonstrate how these economies are at once highly organised and brittle, with each node in their value chains subject to disruption by state and market forces. While relative opacity, labour intensity of tasks and dependence on embodied knowledge ( metis), indeed a 'bodily' feel for space, give informal economies the capacity to resist external efforts to transform, subsume or eradicate them; lack of social security and employment protections also means that workers and micro-enterprise owners within them inhabit the thin line between survival and failure, rendering them vulnerable to economic and political fluctuations. The upshot is that the labour of waste and other informal sector workers is critical for maintaining the quality of life desired by the well off in cities of the global South, but fails to get the recognition it deserves. Waste workers are poorly compensated, regularly stigmatised and frequently invisible in policy decisions. This is an enduring inequity that demands urgent correction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]