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The India–Bangladesh border is the world's fifth longest land border, a focus of political tension in an area with vibrant informal economies. Cross-border communities share culture and language and informal cross-border trade (ICBT) is well-established. This article explores ICBT on the Indian side of the border, examining its actors, power relations and spatial dimensions, and the vulnerabilities of those involved. Debates on the social and cultural roots of ICBT, and the vulnerability of small-scale entrepreneurs to a complicit state, and powerful middlemen in lucrative sectors of ICBT, inform the analysis. The trade is theorized through the lens of jugaad, the Indian term for 'making do' and 'instinctive creativity'. The research draws on case studies of three cross-border sectors, everyday trade in small household goods, the politically sensitive cattle trade, and cross-border medical/healthcare services. The mechanisms of jugaad are seen to some degree in all three case studies, but heavy state regulation gives advantage to controlling middlemen and state officials. Finally, we argue that ICBT is a critical component of the wider political economy in the border regions of West Bengal, and that the forgotten sector of ICBT could, if supported by light-touch regulation, have important poverty-reduction potential in enabling livelihoods for marginalized border communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

About 91% of India's workforce of 520 million is informal, lacking social insurance. However, this paper finds the Social Security Code 2020 wanting, but with potential for universalizing social insurance. The paper spells out the principles that should guide social insurance for informal workers; and presents the design and architecture for extending coverage. It shows how realistically, over the next 10–15 years, social insurance could cover the entire workforce, in accordance with ILO Conventions. It also estimates the fiscal cost of social insurance, for the first five years, and spells out the political economy, fiscal and administrative challenges to universalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on social entrepreneurship primarily reduces social enterprises in the Global South to geographic variations of an idealized concept of combining commercial imperatives with social missions. In the article, I see social enterprise practice in economies of the Global South, namely India and South Africa, as channels to engage in the ongoing theorization of the field. The article draws on the frame of actually existing neoliberalism, moving beyond macroperspectives and policy imperatives on social entrepreneurship to show how neoliberal rationalities are mobilized and regulated by emancipatory rationalities and agendas. The empirical focus is on social enterprises mediating enterprise formation to address employment concerns in the informal, noncapital domains of India and South Africa. I draw on data from the ethnographic fieldwork on mediating social enterprises collected during my doctoral research. The lived realities of practice of the two intermediaries considered in the article, Dhwani in India and EntShare in South Africa, show mediating social enterprises in ongoing negotiations with capital and noncapital domains. Understanding the negotiations explains the convergences and divergences in how neoliberal economic rationalities align with progressive and emancipatory agendas and values across India and South Africa. In doing so, the article provides an opportunity to enrich conceptual registers of postcolonial economic geography by tracing and articulating mediation processes between neoliberal and nonneoliberal rationalities not solely from one site but across contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home-based work is among the largest forms of employment in the informal economy in India and is overwhelmingly represented by women. Employing a social reproduction framework that reframes what is counted as labor, this article asks how women's unpaid work activities are appropriated as labor in subcontracted home-based work. Applying this analytical framework, it becomes clear that domestic work in the home, often completed by women, is needed and exploited in this production process as a result of gendered constructs of care. The contribution considers how unpaid work is directly appropriated by capital as surplus value. The context of informal work is key here because of the irregular and fragmented production process, the space where work occurs, and the use of unpaid family workers. The goal of this research is to offer empirical evidence that broadens analytical perspectives to account for the context of informality in the Global South. HIGHLIGHTS Subcontracted home-based work in India relies on a gendered, fragmented, and precarious labor force. Unpaid caregiving and household work directly contributes to profit-making. Western analytical concepts of the economy need to be reexamined in the context of the postcolonial informal economies. Research tools that measure economic participation need to capture how unpaid activities directly or indirectly contribute to economic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this expository essay, we argue for building a fresh research programme in the political economy of development to analytically investigate and empirically substantiate the specificities of postcolonial capitalism. A key theoretical framework developed through the work of Kalyan Sanyal may be built upon, reformulated and productively deployed for this purpose. We provide a purposive engagement with this framework, its critiques, and the extant literature that develops it further. Some illustrations based on the agricultural and non-agricultural informal economies in India are provided to highlight the significance of this framework in examining the contemporary processes of capitalist development in the global South. The informal segments are marked by a persistence and reproduction of large swathes of non-capitalist economic spaces that are majorly structured around the logic of satisfying consumption needs, without discernible tendencies towards a classical pattern of capitalist transition. These spaces act as holding grounds of the population that is excluded from the capitalist growth poles of the economy and are often rendered as an undesired excess (as a surplus population) for the process of capitalist reproduction. Such a framework may also provide a compelling theoretical structure to interrogate the vast economic and political changes in the global landscape in the current conjuncture, and their implications for labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid-19 exposed the fragility and inadequacies in India's health care system, especially in its public health services. The sudden lockdown imposed during the first wave of the virus severely impacted the livelihoods of millions of migrant workers. Then, in spite of warnings about an impending second wave of infection, the government's failure to prepare the health infrastructure, together with delays in vaccine distribution, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Unlike the first wave of infection, the second wave impacted rural India very badly. Taking into consideration the existing social hierarchies and inequalities, it was marginalised groups of the population who bore the brunt of the pandemic. This article analyses the failures of the Indian government in handling the Covid-19 crisis, especially during the second wave, and concludes by suggesting ways in which the state needs to intervene to avert disasters of this kind in the future. It argues for the adoption of a 'rights-based' approach to public health on the grounds that successive governments have not been properly held to account for their long-term failures to address the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gig work has been considered 'disruptive' by platforms for its market efficiency, but concerns around precarity of work in the Global North have been raised since the early 2000s. In India, the dominance of informal work makes precarious work the norm, thus begging the question, does gig work disrupt or extend this precarity in new directions? Based on in-depth interviews with gig workers in India, this paper explores the relations between the informal economy and platform-based gig work in India with a focus on the experiences of workers. The paper argues that, much like informal work, gig workers bear a disproportionate risk, with their work regulated by social identities of caste and gender that determine entry and exit from work. The digital mediation of work in the gig economy extends such existing social relations of informal work into gig work, especially as labour remains deregulated by the Indian state. Through this, India points us in the direction of what the future of work may be for workers in a global digitised gig economy where such precarious and insecure work is now increasingly entrenched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does informal economic activity respond to increased financial inclusion? Does it become more entrepreneurial? Does access to new financing options change the gender configuration of informal economic activity and, if so, in what ways and what directions? We take advantage of nationwide data collected in 2010/11 and 2015/16 by India's National Sample Survey Office on unorganized (informal) enterprises. This period was one of rapid expansion of banking availability aimed particularly at the unbanked, under-banked, and women. We find strong empirical evidence supporting the crucial role of financial access in promoting entrepreneurship among informal sector firms in India. Our results are robust to alternative specifications and alternative measures of financial constraints using an approach combining propensity score matching and difference-in-differences. However, we do not find conclusive evidence that increased financial inclusion leads to a higher likelihood of women becoming entrepreneurs than men in the informal sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indian women enter the informal workforce for a range of reasons. Women food vendors tend to dominate low-income, low-skill activities, such as selling perishable food items. The aim of this study was to investigate the experiences of women food vendors in India. Twenty-four women were interviewed in 2015 and 2016 about financial matters, livelihoods, family, and housing, and the experience of vending. Findings indicate that women vendors are financially vulnerable, need greater access to education, better work and living conditions, and greater financial management options. Policies and programmes aimed at informal sector workers must recognise gender-specific vulnerabilities facing women vendors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will analyze rural-urban migrant workers' multiple journeys of financial secrecies, gendered solidarities and covert income-management through the use of smartphones and net-banking in the city. Using the narratives of informal domestic workers in Kolkata, a city in eastern India, I show how migrant women managed a shadow network of personal savings, free of surveillance from their rural kin, that was creatively positioned at the interface of modern digital technologies and traditional social relations. I develop the concept of 'migra-monies' to underline how such hidden cash flows within migration landscapes emboldened female workers to envision non-normative gendered subjectivities and economically secure fiscal futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The many Muslim women who make up India's burgeoning informal economy, challenge any attempt to reduce them to homemakers whose lives are delimited by culture and religion. An examination of their lives reveals the complex forces that shape their worlds, and illuminates how they variously negotiate landscapes of inequality in contemporary India. Here I focus on the biography of one Muslim widow to illustrate how she labours to live and dream in contemporary India as various social forces intersect to create precarity in her life. While neoliberal priorities and a shrinking social safety-net affect underprivileged women across religious lines, the intersection of gender, class, and religion in Hindu majoritarian India has made it even more challenging for low-income Muslim women like her to make ends meet. However, dominant forces are not totalising, and the biographical method reveals how one woman negotiates precarity, employing various skills as she adapts to changing conditions, juggling multiple jobs to meet expenses, and envisioning a better future. We see not just the deep inequalities that create precarity for some, but also how dreams can be a material force in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the nation-wide covid-19 lockdown was implemented, a large number of workers who were engaged in beedi work (tobacco manufacturing industry) lost their daily wage work. These people had migrated to metro cities almost ten years ago for their livelihood, working in this perilous industry. Soon thereafter, though, they felt that they had no choice but return to the hazardous beedi work. This narrative tells the story of the formation and development of a small group that aimed to provide relief for the beedi laborers and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's informal economy accounts for more than half the country's GDP but is characterised by low levels of skills, and considerable barriers to skills development for workers. The Government of India has implemented ambitious policy initiatives for upskilling, designed to catalyse 'formalisation' of the economy, and improve productivity. However, evidence on skills development remains weak. Drawing on systematic review methodologies, this article reviews and synthesises the literature on the practical barriers to upskilling. It finds that access to, and quality of, training (especially for women) are serious limitations, while skills are often under-utilised in the absence of supportive labour market and wider business environment conditions. Training is often insufficiently linked to labour market and learner needs, and the capacity of the training system is limited. Government should increase investment in training for the informal sector, and consider strengthening incentives for training providers to focus on improving training quality and relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarship on innovation hitherto has prioritized exchange value, scalability and large scale commercialization, overlooking the other significant human centric values discussed in 'value theory'. Consequently, innovations in the informal economy are often undermined due to their inability to generate exchange values. This paper identifies and examines the suitability of the nuanced set of values discussed in value theory for informal sector grassroots innovations. Based on ten years of ethnographic research in different parts of Jammu and Kashmir in India, we find that these innovations generate a diverse set of values, ranging from use value to socially embedded reciprocal exchange value to different forms of relational and non-relational intrinsic values. At a juncture when strengthening alternative innovation approaches occupies a priority, these findings have important bearing on innovation policy scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's waste is growing fast; so is its research, and so is the informal economy in which it is embedded. Here research on a small-town waste economy (WE) is situated in the literature on urban informal waste, making three contributions. First, an analytical grid is placed over this small-town formal-informal waste economy in terms of its circuits of capital in the generation of waste. These comprise factory production, physical and economic distribution, consumption, the production of labour and the reproduction of society. Second, field evidence for this waste economy is used to interrogate the three prevailing approaches to theorising informality, revealing how social and economic segmentation can simultaneously drive all three theorised relationships in a complementary fashion. Third, the municipal government's fragmented architecture and informal bureaucratic behaviour reveal not only severely compromised management capacities but also the local state's paradoxical dependence on, and distance from, the informal waste economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The informal economy in India provides more than 90 per cent of the labour force. This leads to the largest number of people in informal settings being trained informally and their skills are considered to be low. Previous research findings, however, have not supported this general assumption about low skill levels. The current study is concerned with the sub-sector of urban tailoring that has not yet been the focus of much research. The main questions of interest are: What kinds of skills do Indian tailors have and where and in what ways are these skills acquired? Twelve interviews with tailors were conducted in Delhi and ten in or near Vellore, Tamil Nadu. The results show clearly that tailors in the informal sector in India not only have a wide range of skills in tailoring, but also in organizing and running their business in economic terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in comparative capitalism has seen an increasing interest in emerging economies and has made attempts at integrating the informal economy as a distinct and significant feature of the institutional configuration and reproduction of contemporary capitalisms. The way this has been achieved, however, is problematic as it has mainly worked with a dualist notion of the formal and informal economies, thereby making it difficult to conceptualise any interlinkages. This article argues that the relation between the formal and informal economies needs to be conceptualised as an interlocking one in order to analyse the constitutive place the informal economy has in the dynamics of formal institutions as well as the overall institutional configuration of emerging capitalisms. A focus on interlockages helps in conceptualising diversity, by bringing the heterogeneity of social relations within the formal and informal economies to the fore. This focus also allows for a more nuanced understanding of the distribution of resources across institutions and actors, and how change is shaped by struggles within specific interlocking configurations. India serves as a useful example in this respect insofar as the centrality of the informal economy to Indian capitalism can be shown to be due to the specific interlockages as opposed to the, probably more eye catching, size of its informal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Street cultures of make-do and reuse in contemporary India, colloquially known as jugaad, is a set of material practices that have had a long and established history in the country. This article juxtaposes such practices with ‘repair’ in order to consider the politics of jugaad as it played out in the years following the financial crisis of 2008. As growth rates suffered massive contractions and workers were laid off in large numbers, jugaad came to take on cultural valences in unexpected contexts, especially within business management literature, where it signalled the vibrancy of the ‘informal’ economy. Following the migration of the term into widespread English usage, alongside the parallel, growing demand for the ‘right to repair’ in the United States and Europe, this article traces how an undisciplined, subaltern practice of repurposing came to be repurposed, in turn, in the service of the failing ‘formal’ economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often claimed that industrial restructuring leads to diminished roles for trade unionism and other forms of labour organisations by informalising employment and relocating production. Drawing on selected case studies from long-term fieldwork in regions of India, this article shows that trajectories of industrial restructuring and the responses by organised labour over the past two decades have been diverse. It is argued that the diverse response not only reflects structural opportunities and constraints for labour to be organised in particular ways, but also different histories and experiences of labour association. Contrary to the presumption about the general demise of trade unionism and the apparent unattainability of class solidarity in contemporary globalised capitalism, it is observed that India’s labour movement is experiencing a degree of resurgence, and new forms of labour organisations and activism are emerging, especially involving informal workers in the formal sector. That these innovative forms of mobilisation are shaped by experiences and aspirations that do not conform to the established institutionalised frameworks for dispute resolution has important policy and political implications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the relationship between incidence of poverty and reliance on informal sector by workers in rural areas. The authors find that higher incidence poverty in rural areas can be explained to a certain extent by low wages in the sector, once we control for urbanization and other factors. Given the small size of formal sector and its substantially lower employment elasticity, the scope for expansion of employment in this sector is limited. The article concludes that elimination of rural poverty demands improving the condition of workers in the informal sector, which rests on paying minimum wages besides imparting skills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the role of finance constraints in determining the lack of transition of firms in India from very small family firms, which are the predominant type of firms in the informal sector, into larger informal firms that employ non-family labour. Using a rich firm-level data-set drawn from nationally representative surveys of the Indian informal manufacturing sector, this paper tests for the role played by finance constraints in firm transition in the informal sector at the firm and district level. There is evidence that the difficulty that firms face in accessing external finance acts as a significant constraint to small firm growth in the informal sector. Looking at data from India's districts, it is found that the financial development in a given district increases the likelihood that firms in the district will make the transition from household enterprises into non-household enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents an analysis of 2001 Indian Census data at the state level on women workers in the mining and quarrying (M&Q) sector. In the absence of official data on informal M&Q, the paper uses the census category of ‘marginal workers’ as a rough indicator of informal employment within this industrial category. The paper has two stages of analysis: first, it presents a state-by-state description of employment of women as main and marginal workers in key minerals; it then correlates income and other social indicators to the proportion of women marginal workers in different mineral categories in order to explore the connections between income, poverty/economic ill-being, caste and other social factors and informal M&Q. It concludes that at the state level, correlations are difficult to draw, and that there is need for further elaborate data for analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The resilience of the problem of child labour in the global economy has been amply documented, but, we suggest, the reasons for this situation have not yet been fully captured in the associated debates. Our aim is to advance a way of thinking about those forms of child labour which occur in the context of global production networks (gpns), and to contend that greater attention must be paid to the organisation and functioning of gpns, and the social foundations on which they rest, if we are to grasp more fully the conditions and processes which facilitate the persistence and evolution of child labour. The way of thinking we propose is rooted in the concept of ‘adverse incorporation’ in the global economy, which we develop by drawing together currents in gpn analysis and poverty research to explore the commercial and social dynamics in gpns which give rise to these forms of labour exploitation. We illustrate our arguments with reference to the garments industry in New Delhi, India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Indian manufacturing, which accounts for only 12.2% of the country's workforce, a few technologically advanced sectors coexist with a vast informal sector. The growth of Indian manufacturing is characterized by ‘joblessness’, and during the post-1991 years, by large yearly and industry-wise variations. While a few capital- and skill-intensive industries recorded fast rates of growth of value added, employment generation occurred largely in the unorganized sector, mainly in export-oriented industries such as garments and textiles. The frequently cited argument that the major barrier to manufacturing-employment growth in India is the ‘rigidity’ in the country's labour regulations rests on very thin empirical evidence. With the rising share of contract workers even within the organized segments of manufacturing since the 1990s, the very argument that India's labour market is rigid is questionable. Power shortages, insufficient availability of credit and the volatility in exchange rates and raw material prices are some of the important factors that constrained the growth of Indian manufacturing, especially the small-scale sector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay explores the rapid expansion of small handloom centres in Western India between 1930 and 1970. It attributes the transformation of these places into larger cities to the role of local weaver-capitalists, who developed new markets for local textiles and introduced significant technological innovations into the industry, and who forged strategies for combatting the growth of labour resistance. The essay also highlights the role of the late colonial and early post-Independence states, which promoted the growth of weavers’ co-operatives and which imposed extensive regulations on larger enterprises. The paper argues that the powerloom centres of Western India sustained a ‘hyper-industrial’ quality, with limited economic or cultural diversification, restricted urban amenities and public services, and the extensive concentration of poor urban migrants in slums. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a developing country like India, the formal sector is a coveted employment destination. However, in the present scenario, the formal sector is unable to absorb the entire workforce. In view of these labour demand constraints in the formal sector, this paper sets out to explore the opportunities for the promotion of informal sector employment. It measures employment trends and patterns in the informal sector in India and estimates the sector's employment determinants using a large and nationally representative sample of individual data. The estimation also tests the hypothesis that the determinants of informal sector employment vary with the states’ development levels. Our findings reveal that individuals without any general or technical education have a greater probability of entering the informal sector. As education increases, this probability decreases in all the states irrespective of their development level. In some cases, results for the underdeveloped states contrast with the developing and developed states. For instance, individuals in the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category who always stay in the same employment catchment area have a greater probability of finding a job in the informal sector in the developed and developing states, while they have no exposure to finding a job in the informal sector in the underdeveloped states. Education (both general and technical) and migration are the main policy variables for the promotion of employment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For more than a century, hand-pulled rickshaws have been a prominent part of Calcutta's cityscape. Under the veil of modernization, progress, and globalization, however, the government of West Bengal State declared that rickshaws cause traffic congestion and constitute an exploitative use of human labor. Yet, despite the government-imposed ban, rickshaws continue to ply the streets of central Calcutta. Based on interviews with rickshaw owners, operators, public officials, and local residents, we examine the cultural politics surrounding rickshaw pulling in Calcutta. This article shows that the rickshaw wallahs (pullers), who operate as part of the informal economy, provide an expansive range of services not limited to transportation. Indeed, the rickshaw wallahs form an integral part of Calcutta's social fabric, having made a place for themselves by facilitating social interaction and challenging hegemonic ideas and practices about who belongs where. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several critiques of the book "Workers, Unions and Global Capitalism: Lessons From India," by Rohini Hensman, as well as a response by Hensman. It focuses on workers and trade unions in India. The authors comment on globalization, global capitalism, and neo-liberalism. They also consider Hensman's discussion of India's informal sector and women's and children's labor. Other topics include India's entry into the global economy, political and legal aspects of trade unionism, and poverty.

This paper investigates the relationship between the state and India's rural informal sector by focusing on the collective mobilizations of middle-sized agricultural producers in Western Uttar Pradesh. These cultivators are involved in an economic sector which is at the same time capitalist, largely informal but also, to some extent, state-regulated. Through their mobilizations organized by the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU), they have attempted to influence state regulation of agricultural markets, obtaining increased input subsidies and better procurement prices for their produce, and thus an increase in the rates of return and profitability of their farming activity. The paper conceptualizes the modality of production of these farmers as 'subsidized capitalism', alluding to the self-employed and self-funded producers with holdings large enough to support a pair of bullocks defined as 'bullock capitalists' by Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph (1987), while denoting the crucial role of public subsidies in preserving this faction of informal agrarian capitalism. The paper also points to the ambivalent relationship between the 'subsidized capitalists' of Western Uttar Pradesh and the state: although they seek protection from the central government in the context of globalization, they confront and contest local state institutions by deploying collective strategies to distort local regulations of agricultural markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper applies a theory of institutional change enriched with mezzorules, fluidity and agency to India's informal sector institutional evolution using two illustrative examples. The concrete examples are rooted in unfree labour and rural casual labouring in India, a country which has a high degree of informality. Section 1 introduces some concepts, and section 2 examines processes of institutional change in the informal sector. In section 3, two illustrations are explored: (1) the norms for girl child bonded labour; (2) the individualisation of women labourers. Section 4 concludes. The fluidity of institutional rules demands a recognition of the supra-economic nature of the context within which economic-institutional change occurs. We propose the analysis of mezzorules in a dialogic research context, i.e. interactions among workers and collective agents - as a helpful and transformative approach for sociologists specialising in the informal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalisation has affected the industrial trajectories of developing countries, producing an increasing disarticulation between the management of production and regimes of labour control. While production regimes have been projected into the global arena, labour regimes have remained apparently anchored to regulatory mechanisms provided by local social structures, and gone through increasing processes of informalisation. Examining the case of the Indian garment sector, this paper argues that the informalisation of labour should not be conceived as necessarily taking place 'in the shadow of the state'. In fact, in the case presented here, the state was a strong active agency behind the process of informalisation, which it supported through formal policies and through its progressive alignment with the interests of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past, leading national trade unions in India failed to develop a strong base among unorganised (informal) sector workers and limited their engagement with civil society. Recent initiatives to redress the latter are assessed with reference to the opportunities and constraints that emerge from the organisational structure and ideological and political affiliations of trade unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the 1950s up to the early 1990s the All-India data show an ever-declining share of informal credit in the total outstanding debt of rural households. Contemporaneous micro-level studies, using more qualitative research methodologies, provide evidence that questions the strength of this trend, and more recent All-India credit surveys show, first, a levelling, and then a rise, in the share of rural informal credit in 1990/91 and 2000/01, respectively. By reference to findings of a study of village moneylenders in Rajasthan, the paper notes lessons to be drawn. First, informal financial agents have not disappeared from the rural financial landscape in India. Second, formal-sector financial institutions can learn much about rural financial service needs from the financial products and processes of their informal counterparts. Third, a national survey of informal agents, similar to that of the 1921 Census survey of indigenous bankers and moneylenders, would provide valuable pointers towards policy options for the sector. A recent Reserve Bank of India Report on Moneylender Legislation not only explores incentive mechanisms to better ensure fair practice, but also proposes provision for a new category of loan providers that would explicitly link the rural informal and formal financial sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides an explanation of recent empirical evidence on fragmentation and the expansion of the informal sector in India. We argue that as the prospect of getting a better price in the international market increases, the producers in the formal sector act more like merchants and subcontract production activities to the producers in the informal sectors. Expanding production in the informal sector allows the firm to take advantage of a growing export market. Our theoretical model explains such organizational change in terms of allocation of monitoring effort between marketing and production. The existence of a low-wage informal sector facilitates division of labor and specialization in the formal segment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of public works programmes using the theory of real options argues that the effectiveness of these programmes can be studied by examining the switches the workers make between public works and other labour market activities. The wage rate between these two options is the focus of the analysis under the theory of real options. This paper critically examines the applicability of the econometric methods of the theory of real options by studying the same public works programmes through a local management perspective using a case-study approach. Local elites enjoy 'informal ownership' of public works programmes, and the rights of the poor are therefore shrouded in micro-politics. Besides, for a large number of the poorest people who are trapped in a vicious cycle of debt and seasonal migration, rights and options are foregone. The power of the local elites is discounted heavily in the approach of theory of real options. Relying on such outcome variables—which are manufactured by the local elites—can mislead policy decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross‐border informal trade is one of the most important issues between India and Bangladesh. It takes place between people who live a short distance apart, but who find themselves separated by an international boundary. The people of international border areas believe that cross‐border informal trade is a process to maintain a sustainable livelihood because it provides a livelihood to the unemployed. This research has analysed the nature and impact of informal border trade between India and Bangladesh. It has highlighted the sources of security and insecurity through the process of informal border trade. It also analyses the different socio‐economic conditions of informal border trade in border trade prone areas. This research argues that although informal border trade is considered illegal, it is necessary for the maintenance of the livelihood for the poor in the bordering areas. The state failures in fulfilling the needs of the poor force them to involve themselves in informal border trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade unions in India work mainly with workers in formal employment, particularly in the public sector. However, most people in India work in the informal economy, and their needs are attended mainly by voluntary agencies or NGOs. Economic globalisation and the policies associated with it are resulting in the increasing informalisation of work; as representatives of working people, unions and agencies alike are being further marginalised. Paradoxically, this situation is encouraging these organisations to overcome the mutual mistrust that has characterised relations between them in the past, and to join forces in order to pool their strengths. This article describes the background and current situation in general terms before presenting a case study of the National Centre for Labour (NCL), an apex body of labour organisations of all kinds working in the informal sector in India. Its members include unions and agencies active among workers in the construction industry, as well as in forestry, fishing, and domestic work. Such collaboration has not only enhanced the effectiveness of both the unions and the agencies, but has also increased the unions' representative character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]