Labour

India 2020

A curated set of 35+ articles published in ‘The India Forum’ during a year which began with the demonstrations against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, ended with the farmer protests against the new…
▶24-Dec-2020
The India Forum

The Time Is Right for an Urban Employment Guarantee Programme

Urban workers have been the most badly hit by Covid-19. An employment guarantee would provide income support & also improve urban public services. Criticisms that it is unaffordable & that it…
▶24-Nov-2020
Amit Basole, Rajendran Narayanan, Anand Shrivastava, Rakshita Swamy

The Silent Takeover of Labour Rights

The three new labour codes passed by Parliament without discussion make sweeping changes to labour laws; they reduce the regulatory powers of the government; they hand over some oversight functions…
▶17-Nov-2020
Atul Sood

Bearing Witness to the Covid-19 Lockdown

During the lockdown, migrant workers have produced ‘proofs’ to lay claim to promised aid, display grief and gratitude, and to archive violence they faced. These fragments from the worker-as-witness…
▶14-Oct-2020
Tarangini S, Nitya V

Confronting Precarious Work

The precarisation of labour is written into the very logic of platform business models. Ignoring this, and focusing only on social security measures to protect workers, normalises exploitative labour…
▶07-Oct-2020
Kaveri Medappa, Rajorshi Ray, Mohammad Sajjad Hussain

A Moment for Civilizational Introspection

The devastating effects of the pandemic upon the working poor should be a recognition of the collapse of our moral centre as a nation and as a people. The elite have exiled the poor from their…
▶30-Sep-2020
Harsh Mander

How can more women take up paid employment?

The abysmally low participation of women in paid work in India even today is very worrying. Policy interventions should look at how to encourage higher work participation, through offers of higher…
▶09-Sep-2020
AV Jose

How many casual workers in the cities have sought to go home?

There has been no count of the number of workers returning to their home states. An analysis of NSS data tells us that the first wave of returnees is likely to be mainly urban casual workers who lost…
▶27-May-2020
Nomaan Majid

When the Sewers Get Blocked

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has ended, but are we in "Clean India"? Sanitation systems remain inadequate and the work can be dehumanising for those who remove the blocks in sewage pipes. The job…
▶11-Nov-2019
CS Sharada Prasad, Isha Ray