Search

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]

The extensive research on waste management has primarily remained confined to metro cities and focused on economic and environmental issues. The present study explores waste management in smaller urban areas from an institutional standpoint, mapping formal and informal players onto a two‐dimensional framework: institutional type and institutional strength. The analysis is based on data accumulated through in‐depth interviews and focus group discussions in three towns of India. Despite the absence of formal acknowledgment, it establishes a continuum between formal and informal actors whose efforts to collect waste and provide public goods and services are mutually supportive. Although the informal sector is ranked lower, there is little variation in institutional strength between the formal and informal sectors. A formal‐informal hierarchy hinders informal waste collectors from moving up the value chain. The paper argues against separating the formal and informal actors in urban policy and planning. A waste management system that is formally integrated is required to extract greater economic value from waste and to strengthen the informal‐formal continuum. This should enhance both the wages and working conditions of waste workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a general equilibrium model of a developing economy with a capital intensive formal sector and a large informal sector with sector-specific capital to analyse the effects of investments on the sectoral returns to capital, sectoral wage rates, and composition of output and employment. Beginning with capital market disequilibrium (unequal sectoral rates of return) and labour market distortion (formal-informal wage gap), the model traces the evolution of the economy till capital market equilibrium is attained. The investments in the formal sector equalise the wages (a 'turning point' in growth à la Lewis) and reduces the size of the informal sector. The sectoral rates of returns equalise only if there is no factor intensity reversal, otherwise the economy specialises in the production of formal goods. The investments in the informal sector equalise the rates of return, do not affect the size of the formal sector and finally, a formal-informal wage gap persists provided factor intensities are not reversed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary driver for innovations in the formal sector is credited to the institution of patenting. Intellectual property rights (IPRs) as the extrinsic motivational factor have supported innovations by firms and industries which have a large market and resources to commercialise their products. Grassroots innovations, on the other hand, represent a culture of individual innovators outside formal sector who innovate out of adversity, curiosity and needs. Most of the innovators have cited intrinsic motivation behind the innovation and are unaware of IPR. However, there is a paucity of literature on the relation between IPR and innovations in the informal sector. Drawing on the literature on IPR and innovations in the formal sector, we examine whether the same theories and rationales apply to a different nature of innovations in the informal sector. This is an exploratory study and to map the current scenario of patenting for grassroots innovations secondary data were collected from the National Innovation Foundation (NIF) website. To understand the innovators’ perception, we interviewed them through various means and on different sites. The study finds that although there was no initial intention to innovate for extrinsic incentives like patenting, there is an increasing trend in filing patents for grassroots innovations by the NIF in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the growth barriers of informal sector enterprises in India. The empirical analysis is based on the National Sample Survey Organization's unit-level data for three years, 2000-2001, 2005-6, and 2010-11. The results of the study reveal: proprietary and large firms survive and grow; enterprises managed by women are less likely to decline; inadequate power supply poses a severe growth obstacle to all categories of firms; and proprietary firms encounter capital shortage while large firms are constrained by the non-availability of raw materials. We do not find evidence of sub-contracting acting as an enabling factor in firm growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies a qualitative approach to the legal segmentation analysis developed by Dingeldey et al. (2021), considering exclusion from, and hierarchies of, worker protection. Examining the cases of China, India, Malaysia and Viet Nam, the author finds that several factors distinguish these countries from those in the global North and produce distinct labour market outcomes, namely: in terms of the relative size of the workforce operating outside the effective coverage of employment regulation; legal terminology that is not readily translated into Western languages; and legal history, especially as regards the mismatch between statutory frameworks and the labour market resulting from colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resumen: Siguiendo el marco de Dingeldey et al. (2021), pero con un enfoque cualitativo, se analiza la segmentación legal del trabajo en China, la India, Malasia y Viet Nam, prestando atención a los niveles de exclusión y a las jerarquías de protección otorgada. El autor observa varios factores que diferencian a estos países de los del Norte y que determinan sus mercados de trabajo: el tamaño relativo de la población activa que opera fuera de la cobertura efectiva de la reglamentación laboral; la terminología jurídica, de difícil traducción a los idiomas occidentales; y la historia jurídica, especialmente en lo que respecta al desajuste entre los marcos jurídicos y el mercado laboral resultante del colonialismo. [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 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]

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]

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]

This paper uses a comprehensive new data source to document basic facts about geographic concentration among industries in India from 1998 to 2013. Unlike previous studies, our data allow us to accurately measure industrial concentration at the district level and cover manufacturing and services, as well as the formal and informal sectors. Our most striking finding is that average levels of industrial concentration fell dramatically between 1998 and 2013, driven by steep reductions in capital‐intensive manufacturing industries. We provide suggestive evidence that this increasing dispersion may be due to improvements in interregional transportation coupled with inefficient land management policies and limited labor mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of decline in traditional industrial relations institutions in post-Fordist economies, the authors review the patterns of counter-movement to globalization that are emerging in the defence of workers in developing countries, with a particular focus on Asia. From the Marxian struggle they identify in China to the widely varied forms of protest and representational organization they observe in India, they argue for a more inclusive approach to industrial relations, both in practice and in research. The future, they suggest, will be shaped by the interplay of reform from above and the social movements spontaneously filling today's representational vacuum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid ageing of India's population, in conjunction with migration out of rural areas and the continued concentration of the working population in the informal sector, has highlighted the need for better economic security arrangements for the elderly. Traditional family ties that have been key to ensuring a modicum of such security are beginning to fray, and increased longevity is making care of the elderly more expensive. As a result, the elderly are at increased risk of being poor or falling into poverty. In parallel with its efforts to address this issue, the Government of India and some of the Indian states have initiated an array of programmes for providing some level of access to health care or health insurance to the great majority of Indians who lack sufficient access. Formal-sector workers have greater social security than those in the informal sector, but they only represent a small share of the workforce. Women are particularly vulnerable to economic insecurity. India's experience offers some lessons for other countries. Although there is space for private initiatives in the social security arena, it is clear that most such efforts will need to be tax-financed. The role that private providers can play is substantial, even when most funding comes from public sources, but such activity will face greater challenges as more individuals seek benefits. India has also shown that implementation can often be carried out well by states using central government funds, with a set of advantages and disadvantages that such decentralization brings. Finally, India's experience with implementation can offer guidance on issues such as targeting, the use of information technology in social security systems, and human resource management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While India is among the world's largest producers and exporters of apparel products, the sector has not performed to its potential. This study analyzes why this might be so from the perspective of the structure of production in the sector, the most striking aspect of which is a firm size distribution heavily dominated by small firms. Using nationally representative firm-level and labor force survey data, we argue that the dominance of firms operating at scales too small to apply modern production and management technologies is one proximate reason for India's relative underperformance. Further, we note that India's labor regulations and the associated enforcement regime are important policy drivers of Indian firms' tendency to avoid placing 'too many workers under one roof'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

T.S. Papola, who passed away in November 2015, was one of the founding members of the Editorial Board of the International Labour Review in 2007. But he was above all a pioneering figure of labour economics in India, whose influential work has gained wide international recognition. Drawing on the author's personal acquaintance and collaboration with Professor Papola, this short article highlights some of his major contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of multinational firms on the domestic agricultural sector in developing countries is controversial, in particular in India. Relying on a unique set of household-level data from the state of Punjab, we study the biggest dairy company in the world (Nestlé) in India and compare its vertical spillover effects on upstream suppliers to other market channels (informal sector and cooperatives). We find that farmers that supply informal channels are less efficient and earn lower profits per dairy animal than farmers supplying the cooperative and the multinational sector. Furthermore, we find that farmers using the multinational channel are more efficient than farmers in the cooperative channel, but equally profitable. Hence, we do not find that supplying the cooperative channel is more beneficial for local dairy farmers than supplying the multinational channel. Overall, however, dairy productivity and profitability levels are still dramatically low, with substantial scope for dairy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The policy issue of how to target poor households rather than provide universal coverage takes the primary place in the question of redistribution where resources are limited. The Government of India’s social protection programs, particularly the old age pension for the informal sector of the economy, has taken a targeting approach. In this article we show that there is a case for universal coverage since ageing households experience greater exclusion from market-based protection as well as from informal (household-based) protection. We make the argument for universal coverage on two grounds: first, a targeted approach has resulted in leakage, indicating that non-poor elderly individuals in the unorganized sector also require some sort of support. Though they are valid, we do not resort to traditional arguments against targeting, such as that it creates institutional lock-in mechanisms and stigmatizes the recipients. Second, the loss of income on age-related matters (e.g. hospitalization) or the ability of elderly individuals to gain credit is not particularly class-specific, although the targeting policy implies it is. The article is based on the secondary data source of the National Sample Survey, primary data sources, particularly those conducted by the authors in Kerala and Maharashtra and specifically designed for the ageing population, and ethnographic observations from fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) is a trade union founded in 1972 to organize women in the informal sector in the western Indian state of Gujarat for better working conditions and social security provisions. The Gujarat Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT) and the SEWA Bank are independently registered SEWA sister organizations that facilitate self-employed women's access to housing and financial services, respectively. This paper seeks to document and critically analyze the experiences of MHT and SEWA Bank in partnering with the state, the private sector, funding agencies, urban local bodies and other NGOs in developing and delivering housing, water and sanitation programs for low-income urban families living in slums. Using MHT as a case study, this paper will shed light upon challenges and opportunities NGOs may face while collaborating with partners with different core philosophies, motivations, working styles, strengths and constraints. The paper also makes recommendations that would enable different actors to play an optimal role in partnerships designed to improve the living and working conditions of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal mining activities provide livelihoods for millions of poor in mineral-rich developing countries. Yet, they continue to remain one of the least understood areas in mineral resource management. While its poverty reduction potential is acknowledged, the heterogeneous forms of mining that come under its purview are not well discussed. This article aims to draw attention to the politics of definition by briefly introducing the reader to the nomenclature currently used to describe such mining activities. Then the article examines the nature of informality that justifies the name, and then illustrates the claim by documenting a range of informal mining practices in India with cited examples from other Asian countries. It illustrates the variations in social-economic, technical and legal characteristics, by putting such mining in a community and participatory framework. Finally, the article discusses ways to move towards sustainable development with community participation in mineral-rich areas of developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public employment programs may affect poverty both directly through the income they provide and indirectly through general equilibrium effects. We estimate both effects, exploiting a reform that improved the implementation of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and whose rollout was randomized at a large (sub‐district) scale. The reform raised beneficiary households' earnings by 14%, and reduced poverty by 26%. Importantly, 86% of income gains came from non‐program earnings, driven by higher private‐sector (real) wages and employment. This pattern appears to reflect imperfectly competitive labor markets more than productivity gains: worker's reservation wages increased, land returns fell, and employment gains were higher in villages with more concentrated landholdings. Non‐agricultural enterprise counts and employment grew rapidly despite higher wages, consistent with a role for local demand in structural transformation. These results suggest that public employment programs can effectively reduce poverty in developing countries, and may also improve economic efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the effect of COVID‐19‐induced lockdown on the profitability of listed firms in India. We use quarterly income statement of 4168 listed firms for the period between April–June 2020 quarter and April–June 2022 quarter and compare their financial data with previous quarters (2015–2019). Using a difference‐in‐difference estimation framework and various profitability measures, we find that the COVID‐19 lockdown has reduced profits by around 15 per cent for listed firms in India. Our results are robust to various robustness tests and alternate specifications. We find evidence of firms losing revenues more than expenses, thus leading to decline in profits. The main effect is conditioned by firm‐specific factors. Specifically, firms that are smaller, older, unlisted and that do not belong to any group witnessed larger decline in profitability due to lockdown. Additionally, the effect of lockdown is more pronounced in areas that had lower mobility and higher COVID‐19 spread. These results underscore the importance of institutional factors and pre‐existing firm characteristics in conditioning the impact of lockdown on firm profitability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that foreign capital liberalization reduces capital misallocation and increases aggregate productivity for affected industries in India. The staggered liberalization of access to foreign capital across disaggregated industries allows us to identify changes in firms' input wedges, overcoming major challenges in the measurement of the effects of changing misallocation. Liberalization increases capital overall. For domestic firms with initially high marginal revenue products of capital (MRPK), liberalization increases revenues by 23%, physical capital by 53%, wage bills by 28%, and reduces MRPK by 33% relative to low MRPK firms. The effects of liberalization are largest in areas with less developed local banking sectors, indicating that inefficiencies in that sector may cause misallocation. Finally, we propose an assumption under which a novel method exploiting natural experiments can be used to bound the effect of changes in misallocation on treated industries' aggregate productivity. These industries' Solow residual increases by 3–16%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While authoritarian populism and its relationship to the rural world have gained analytical prominence recently, few have attempted a systematic exploration of how various authoritarian populisms emerge from, and are embedded within, dynamics of capital accumulation, state, and class struggle. Drawing on Poulantzas' approach to "state contradictions," we focus on the ways by which bovine meat figures in Narendra Modi's authoritarian populist project in contemporary India. On the one hand, violent authoritarianism in the country uses beef eating as a powerful tool for subjugating subaltern groups to Hindutva rule. On the other hand, the country houses a rapidly expanding beef meat agro‐industry, accounting for as much as 20% of global exports and based on corporate concentration around dominant class interests. We argue that this points to state contradictions in Modi's India witnessing strained accumulation patterns. These contradictions, we emphasize, have distinct ramifications for India's classes of labour in the countryside, as certain groups experience what we describe as a process of "double victimization." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the impact of an extreme monetary shock, India's demonetization of 2016, on domestic agricultural trade. Using data from around 3000 regulated markets for 35 major crops, we find that trade value fell by 16.3–16.8% in the short run, settling at 11.8–12.1% after eight months, driven primarily by a decline in prices. Triple difference estimates suggest sharpest impacts for kharif crops, perishables and crops with minimal government intervention. Markets far away from banks fared worse. Our results suggest that the implosion of value of agricultural trade domestically persisted two growing seasons beyond the one that coincided with the shock, whereas existing findings suggest that the negative impact on the economy as a whole dissipates in that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 crisis re‐shaped many livelihood options and placed significant burdens on those with precarious incomes exacerbating persisting vulnerabilities, especially among a large section of the migrant population. This group faced a dual threat – both to their livelihood and health. To understand the consequences of this pandemic on the income of the migrant population, a household level survey was conducted in the state of Bihar, India, which is one of the highest migrant‐sending states. We examine the role of differences in the socio‐economic status of migrants and their households in determining the extent of vulnerability caused by the COVID‐19 crisis. Vulnerability is proxied by the income lost by migrants during the lockdown. The results suggest that households with diversified income portfolio, larger landholdings, and those receiving government benefits suffered significantly lower income loss whereas, larger household size and greater distance from town tended to escalate income loss. Additionally, private salaried workers faced higher income loss and an increment in years of education lowers the losses significantly. It is observed that individual‐level characteristics also played a significant role in determining economic loss due to the lockdown. Our findings suggest a binding necessity to actively shape policies considering the financial insecurity of vulnerable migrants at their destination and the household members at the origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines critically the economic package announced by the Indian central government to counter the challenges of lives and livelihood in the Covid‐19 pandemic. This paper estimates the shares of the fiscal economic packages in two phases as per the shares of the vulnerable workers and number of Covid‐19 cases in the Indian states. The recent data on labour market are used from National Sample Survey Organization and data on Covid‐19 cases from Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. This paper recommends alternatively a fiscal stimulus package of Rs. 10 lakh crores (5% of GDP) with an immediate effect to counter the present problems of health, food and unemployment in the pandemic and should be extended to Rs. 24 lakh crores (12% of Indian GDP) to the Indian states for at least 1 year to protect the lives and livelihood of the most vulnerable, informal and migrant workers. The populous and poor states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have higher share of vulnerable workers and highly industrialized states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi and Tamil Nadu have higher number of Covid‐19 cases. Due to the unplanned lockdown in India, there has been a surge in Covid‐19 cases across the country that in turn led to an increase in vulnerable workers in poor states due to reverse migration from industrialized states to populous and poor states during the pandemic. Furthermore, the paper explains the five significant factors that justify the adoption of an expansionary fiscal policy rather than monetary policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist economists have long questioned the dichotomy between the "private" versus "public" spheres of women's work and have argued for a more nuanced understanding of the marketable paid work and the unpaid work of household caregiving. This paper focuses on women street food vendors' (SFVs) experiences before and during Covid‐19 pandemic to understand how street food vending as a livelihood activity interacts with social dimensions like gender and division of labor. Through multiple in‐depth interviews with 23 women street vendors in Bengaluru, India, before and during the pandemic, we show that there is a blurring of the dichotomy between the work done in the private and public spaces before the pandemic, which is disrupted by Covid‐19 crisis. The first half of the paper explores the household labor dynamics in the context of paid and unpaid work of women and explains how the women SFVs, capitalizing on their existing skills of "cooking," were able to gain agency and recognition for themselves within the households. The second half of the paper focuses on the narratives of the same women SFVs during the first wave of the Covid pandemic and the subsequent lockdown. We find that the Covid crisis brought back the dichotomy between private and public spheres, making it more pronounced, with women losing their control over the public sphere and their work being restricted only to the private sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though the behaviour of output composition during structural change is highly stylised, the behaviour of the inter‐sectoral relative prices is not. We explore two related questions in the context of structural change in India and China (1950–2010). First, what factors determine changes in the inter‐sectoral relative prices during structural change and growth? Second, is there a link between the behaviour of the relative price and the 'pace' of structural change? We show that the overall pace of structural change has been much slower in India than in China. With the help of a two‐sector growth model comprising a traditional sector producing agricultural goods and a modern sector producing industrial commodities, we show that the slower pace can be explained by the way sectoral growth dynamics affect the behaviour of the relative price over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural households in developing countries often depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. However, many also pursue off‐farm economic activities either to complement their farm income or because they lack access to agricultural land. Rural off‐farm employment is often informal and temporary. Searching for jobs can be associated with high transaction costs, which may be a constraint on some households' participation in off‐farm employment. The increasing spread of mobile phones may help to reduce these transaction costs. Here, we test the hypothesis that mobile phone ownership increases rural households' participation in off‐farm employment and—through this mechanism—also improves household income. We use nationally representative panel data from rural India and regression models with household fixed effects to control for confounding factors and unobserved heterogeneity. We find that mobile phone ownership is positively associated with the likelihood of participating in various types of off‐farm employment, including casual wage labour, salaried employment and non‐agricultural self‐employment. This association is larger in female‐headed than in male‐headed households. The estimates also show that mobile phone ownership is positively associated with household income, partly channelled through the off‐farm employment mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In developing countries where medical infrastructure, service delivery systems, and the markets for health insurance are underdeveloped, one important mechanism to cope with the consequences of health shocks is the intra‐household substitution of labor. This paper studies the impact of short‐term illness shocks on labor supply and wage earnings of prime‐aged individuals using data from agricultural households in India. It also documents the compensating intra‐household labor supply responses of other non‐ill members of the household. We find that an illness shock reduces an individual's monthly wage earnings by 7.1% via the decline in the individual's days of employment in the labor market. Further, an illness shock to the household head causes a compensating increase in the wage labor supply of the wife. An illness shock to the wife, however, induces the household head to devote more time to domestic activities. The compensating labor supply responses are only partially able to insure the loss in total wage income of the household. Our results indicate that the gender‐based specialization of labor weakens in the event of an illness shock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's far-reaching civil service pension reforms in 2008 provided its fragmented and diffuse pension system a unifying organizing framework. The design and architecture of the reformed civil service program, the National Pension System, was subsequently extended to those employed in private formal and informal sectors. The article assesses India's pension reforms and identifies challenges for the National Pension System in providing old-age income security. The article also presents estimates for universal social pension scheme and argues that its implementation is constrained by political factors and not necessarily by fiscal constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with various specifications of technology, markup, and interest rate shocks are estimated with Indian data using Kalman filter based pure and Bayesian likelihood estimation. Preference and interest rate shocks are found to be important for output determination, whereas markup and interest rate shocks are important for inflation. News, as contained in stock market variables and arising from anticipated interest rates, affects growth of gross domestic product. Interest rate shock is anticipated at horizon of one quarter and out of total variance explained by interest rate shock, one third is due to the anticipated shock. Anticipated interest rate shock diminishes the share of preference shock in output determination. Although markup shock has a large share, its persistence is low. There is evidence that permanent component of technology is not well anticipated. Once we incorporate this, technology shocks affect output more, although they still remain much below US levels. Implications for policy include forward guidance on interest rates, less reaction to short‐term supply shocks, and allowing technology shocks to play out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sudden health shocks may be devastating if their consequences are transferred to human capital formation of children, especially in families that are unable to access affordable healthcare. As such, access to health insurance may play a role in determining schooling decisions. I examine the impact of India's national health insurance scheme (RSBY) on gender differences in school enrolments in this paper. Employing difference‐in‐differences and triple differences approaches, I find that RSBY reduces the gender gap in school enrolments. Therefore, while RSBY was implemented with the aim of reducing financial burden for the poor, I find evidence that it has unintended positive consequences for girls in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of the present study is to compare and assess the socio‐economic implications of the 1918 influenza pandemic and the COVID‐19 pandemic in India. Both pandemics are similar in the nature of their disease and spread, and have had a far‐reaching impact on society and economies worldwide. To achieve their objective, the researchers adopted the method of systematic literature review (SLR). The findings of the review have been categorised in four subsections: comparison of 1918 influenza and COVID‐19 pandemics in a global context; economic consequences of a pandemic in India; social consequences of a pandemic in India; and the pandemic mitigation measures adopted by India. The findings suggest there are similarities in the socio‐economic implications of the two pandemics and also indicate that developing countries face more severe implications of such pandemics as compared to developed countries. The research findings from the review of literature are followed by the recommendations made by the researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation: Governments support women's self‐employment as a means to support women's empowerment. While they tend to do this by providing financial assistance, skills development and vocational training, they have not paid enough attention to entrepreneurship‐related education in the school curriculum. The article addresses this research and policy gap. Purpose: While education may lead women to take up self‐employment, anecdotal evidence also suggests that as women continue towards higher education, they tend to opt for wage employment. We investigate whether secondary school is the ideal time to encourage young women to take up self‐employment. Approach and Methods: To test our hypothesis, we used two rounds of the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) dataset as it contains granular information about education and self‐employment at the individual level. We analysed data in univariate and multivariate settings. Findings: Our results indicate that while education is a key dimension for women's self‐employment earnings, its effects peak at moderate levels of secondary education. We find that the increase in business income for each additional year of schooling between classes 9 and 12 (ages 15 to 18) is more than four times that from classes 1–8 and over twice that beyond class 12. We also find that social factors, such as marriage and infrastructure, have implications for the returns of education to women's income from running a business. Policy implications: To improve women's economic and social empowerment, policy‐makers should encourage women to attain higher levels of education, since it is a significant predictor of entrepreneurial endeavours. Second, the 9–12 curriculum should focus on making girls and young women more aware of entrepreneurship and encourage them to take up self‐employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To contain the spread of the Covid‐19 pandemic, the mandated social distancing and restricted market activities have adversely affected the employment and earnings of the poor who are considered the targeted beneficiaries of the Microfinance Institutions (MFIs). The MFI operation and more specifically fresh lending are under serious threat as the mode of operations primarily involve physical interaction while distributing credits at the clients' doorsteps, conducting periodic group meetings and carrying out regular collections. This short article attempts to analyze the various challenges that MFIs may encounter in their current and future operations due to the ongoing pandemic. It discusses how the government initiated coping mechanisms may help MFIs overcome or minimize the pandemic challenges. At the same time, MFIs' efforts towards continued services are expected to create a win‐win situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India has been hard‐hit by the Covid‐19 pandemic. The virus has exacted a heavy toll in terms of lives lost and deteriorating health outcomes. The economic consequences of the pandemic have been similarly grim. In this paper we attempt an initial, interim, assessment of the impacts of the crisis on poverty. We review the growing literature that considers emerging poverty impacts, noting that there remain significant knowledge gaps due to limited evidence on current welfare outcomes. We analyze pre‐Covid survey data to examine the incidence of chronic poverty and downward mobility during a period of rapid economic growth and declining poverty. A profile of poverty during such a period might offer a plausible, partial, window on population groups currently at risk. We suggest that, notwithstanding the severe initial impacts of the crisis on poverty, there are grounds for expecting further consequences going forward. As the virus has spread out of the relatively affluent cities, and as economic stagnation persists, rural areas, with historically higher rates of chronic poverty and vulnerability, may see particularly sharp increases in poverty. While recent vaccination developments offer some grounds for optimism, there remains an urgent need to identify, implement and amplify effective policy alleviation measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial liberalization is a key component of programmes of orthodox structural adjustment. Financial reforms include, among other things, the removal of controls on interest rates and the abolition of programmes of directed credit. Here the effect of financial sector reform on rural banking and rural credit transactions in India is examined, with particular reference to landless labour households. First, the trends in selected indicators of rural banking at the national level over the last 30 years are reviewed. Secondly, longitudinal data for a village in Tamil Nadu are used to examine changes in patterns of indebtedness and credit transactions among landless labour households. It is argued that the exploitation of landless labour households in the credit market has intensified with the introduction offinancial reforms. Lastly, the policy envisaged as an alternative to the formal credit sector in the countryside - the establishment of micro-credit projects - is examined critically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the use of decomposition exercises, this article estimates the relative contributions of different factors to inequality among Indian regular wage employees between 1993/94 and 2011/12. It also estimates the contributions of returns to factors and shares of factors determining inequality. The author finds that the single largest contributor among the regular wage workforce in India is access to higher education. However, institutional factors such as union membership and employment in the public sector also play important roles, indicating that inequality cannot be simply reduced to demographic or technical factors, but must also take into account the institutional structure of an economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business model innovation at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) is typically understood from the "poor as buyers' lens." Through the lens of stakeholder theory and sharing economy principle, our study documents, with the help of a participative observation approach, how business model innovation (BMI) is successfully implemented at the BoP with "poor as suppliers." We show how design of incentives to stakeholders becomes a crucial factor toward successful implementation of BMI in subsistence markets. Further, we show how sharing economy principles are applied in agriculture, leading to economic and social sustainability to stakeholders. Our findings support the emerging literature on how such innovation can contribute to poverty alleviation in an emerging market context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian federation is highly centripetal, and historically, this has left states without the requisite legislative and fiscal authority to take independent action and initiate policies of significance. Consequently, India's response to the global COVID‐19 pandemic was to impose a very severe countrywide lockdown using the mandate of the Union (federal) government. This centralized one‐size‐fits‐all diktat was imposed despite high variations across states in resources, healthcare capacity, and incidence of COVID‐19 cases. We argue that India's dysfunctional federalism is the reason for the centralized lockdown, preventing state and local governments from tailoring a policy response to suit local needs. Using mobility data, we demonstrate the high variation in curtailing mobility in different states through the centralized lockdown. We find that India's centralized lockdown was at best a partial success in a handful of states, while imposing enormous economic costs even in areas where few were affected by the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the processes of migrant labour exploitation which are crucial for capitalist growth and the inequalities they generate. Ethnographic research conducted in different sites across India shows how patterns of seasonal labour migration are driven by class relations marked by hierarchies of identity (caste and tribe) and the spatial geopolitics of internal colonialism (region) – differences that are mobilised for accumulation. Labour migration scholarship has mainly explored sites of production. We extend recent social reproduction theory (SRT) and an older literature on labour migration and reproduction to argue that the intimate relationship between production and social reproduction is crucial to the exploitation of migrant labour and that this means we have to place centre‐stage the analysis of invisible economies of care which take place across spatiotemporally divided households, both in the place of migration and in the home regions of migrants. Furthermore, we develop recent work on SRT and migration to argue that an analysis of kinship (gender over generations, not just gender) is crucial to these invisible economies of care. This analysis is important in showing the machinations of capitalist growth and for political alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on ethnographic material to analyse how unemployed youth create work in the private educational sector. It shows how a set of educated young men, who moved from rural areas to a north Indian city to find work, are seeking to create jobs after an extended period of unemployment. Having attended coaching clinics and private tuition centres to prepare for white‐collar jobs, they draw on the experience, knowledge, and skills they have gained to create work in those same institutions. They do so by running errands and creating services for institutions, as well as undertaking administrative duties and teaching classes. Our main argument is that young men creatively engage with notions of enterprise to make an income and acquire a measure of respect. Studies of enterprise culture and neoliberal subjectivity formation often emphasise how individuals shore up their own value by competing with others and promoting their own interests. But we highlight how youth also maintain their value by making sense of their strategies in terms of assisting other young people. At the same time, however, their practises work to reproduce gender norms and class inequalities. This paper draws on ethnographic material to analyse how unemployed youth create work in the private educational sector in north India. Our main argument is that young men creatively engage with notions of enterprise to make an income and acquire a measure of respect. Studies of enterprise culture and neoliberal subjectivity formation often emphasise how individuals shore up their own value by competing with others and promoting their own interests, but we highlight how youth also maintain their value by making sense of their strategies in terms of assisting other young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The Indian hair and beauty salon industry is growing rapidly due to the demand for beauty and personal care services and products. Workers in the industry are vulnerable to several occupational factors such as chemicals, confined space, and poor ventilation. Chemicals in the products used are known or suspected to cause allergies, respiratory, neurological and reproductive health problems and cancer. Methods: The present study was carried out to determine the factors associated with the occurrence of respiratory morbidity among hair and beauty salon workers of Udupi taluk, Karnataka, India. A total of 240 salon workers were recruited for the study. A semistructured, interviewer‐led questionnaire was used to collect data. Peak expiratory flow rate (PEFR) was done using a JSB peak flow meter. Results: The frequency of respiratory morbidity among participating beauty salon workers was 19%. Men reported respiratory symptoms more frequently than women. Receiving training on work materials and practices was a significant protective factor (odds ratio = 0.3; 95% confidence interval: 0.1‐0.7) for the occurrence of respiratory morbidity. The mean observed PEFR in these workers was significantly lower than their predicted values. While 61.2% of the workers were using some form of personal protective equipment, only 4% of workers used a mask or respiratory protection. Conclusion: Hair and beauty salon workers are at risk of developing respiratory morbidity potentially from harmful exposures and lack of effective control measures at the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1990s Chilika Lake saw a conflict over aquaculture practices that culminated in a process of de facto privatization of the lake waters and the implementation of illegal shrimp cultivation. An earlier article explored the class dynamics of the conflict and the present paper, based on a 2015 fieldwork revisit, reviews the unfolding of the socioeconomic dynamics underlying the illegal aquaculture activities. Looking at recent developments in the implementation of illegal shrimp cultivation in the lake, it interrogates the underlying balance between coercion and consent, and the implications for the livelihoods and protest politics of the fishing people. The paper draws attention to the reality of occupational displacement, analysing its implications for the viability of the fisher people's oppositional movement. Through doing so, it draws renewed attention to the complexity of state–society relations underlying the dynamics that govern conflict and critically contributes to recent debates on subaltern politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces plastic recycling networks in Kolkata, India, as a case to illustrate the contradictory entanglement of economic and environmental change in urban informal contexts of the Global South. In light of the prevailing environmental critique of informal plastic recycling in India, this article discusses plastic recyclers' environmental impact and contribution as well as the potential to enhance the environmental and economic performance of their business. Network and chain approaches in the emerging field of Environmental Economic Geography are combined with the notion of social metabolism to conceptualize the entanglement of environmental and economic processes as well as socio‐environmental inequalities entailed in recycling networks. The analysis reveals the impact that the heterogeneity and fluctuation of plastic waste supply has on the economic organization of recycling networks, giving rise to distinct forms of governance in its intermediate and down‐stream segments. Such an integrated perspective also serves to explain why environmental upgrading is hard to achieve under prevailing circumstances by plastic recyclers in Kolkata. Based on an assessment of the social and political conditions of informality under which plastic recyclers operate, the adoption of common assumptions about ecological modernization imbuing parts of Environmental Economic Geography is called into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the ways in which the concept of volume is deployed to create and sustain surgical expertise. Drawing on research at a large plastic and orthopedic surgery hospital in Tamil Nadu, India, I explore the ways in which a steady supply of trauma is converted into medical expertise, reputation, and care. Volume functions as a key metric by which this conversion takes place. This hospital is particularly well known for its cutting-edge treatment of severe trauma, and, while some Indian hospitals have used their combination of low cost and high expertise to attract foreign patients for medical tourism, this hospital has converted its supply of trauma patients into surgical expertise that brings foreign surgeons there to learn. This article therefore also considers the role of visiting foreign doctors in this form of clinical tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 pandemic has brought renewed attention to the lack of urban planning and its public health implications in developing countries. Slum communities face the dual challenges of chronically poor residential environments and the acute effects of a pandemic and the preventive measures that follow. In this paper, I assess the effectiveness and implications of social distancing, frequent handwashing, and lockdown in the context of slums in Indian cities, where overcrowding, lack of access to water and sanitation, and dependence on daily wages for sustenance and livelihood are common. Using data from multiple sources, I demonstrate that not only will these measures be hard to achieve in slums in the short term due to specific characteristics of these habitats, but they will bring new challenges in the long term due to disproportionate impacts on the urban poor. Lessons learned from this pandemic will require us to rethink public health responses and urban planning practices that could better prepare our cities for future pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Asian Politics & Policy is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)