Contested Nature of Social Security in Globalising India
Contents
- Interrogating the State: Social Security
- The Challenge of Gendering of Social Security
- Nature of India’s Workforce
- Nature of Social Security in India
- Conclusion: Ensuring Livelihood Security:
The Challenge of Gendering of Social Security
According to Holmes and Jones (2013), an analysis of social security programs shows that the approach is more focused on providing safety nets and eradicating income poverty in the short term. Social security still has a way to go before realizing its full potential to address the underlying issues of vulnerability and inequality. Social security requires a gender-responsive strategy. Due to gender inequality and discrimination, poor women and girls are more likely than other groups to experience lifelong poverty (Chronic Poverty Research Centre 2009). Women also make up a disproportionate number of the poor population. Due to their culturally and socially imposed roles and responsibilities, women have fewer opportunities to generate income and assets. They also face more social risks and vulnerabilities (Holmes and Jones 2013:3).
Holmes and Jones (2013) make the case for a gender sensitive approach based on two indicators: first, greater gender equality and second, the idea that gender equality is a fundamental human right. Recognizing the multiple barriers, including institutional bias, ingrained sociocultural norms, and gender roles, that contribute to the persistence of gender inequality is important (Kabeer 1994). Promoting gender equity thus necessitates that income-increasing poverty reduction strategies also address the social causes of poverty and vulnerability.
Nature of India’s Workforce
India has a sizable workforce that is unprotected and unsecure, and the country's vulnerability is increased by the fact that the economy is characterized by jobless growth. According to Breman and Kannan (2013), who cited the 2004 National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector1 (NCEUS) reports, the workforce's living circumstances include the following:
- 1. In the unorganized sector, 86% of all workers are employed
- 2. In the Indian economy, self-employment predominates; the primary worker is supported by unpaid family labor.
- 3. The second-largest category of labor is casual labor, which is characterized by low pay and erratic hours. Workers experience both short-term and long-term unemployment, and the nature of the work is seasonal.
- 4. Workers in this category are considered vulnerable because, in addition to receiving low wages and having sporadic employment, their working conditions are frequently appalling, lacking in basic conveniences, and frequently involve bonded labor.
- 5. Especially for women from Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), the informal sector is dominated by women, which is problematic. These women work in jobs with significant pay gaps, low skill and education requirements, and unstable pay.
- 6. Worker conditions include a lack of a labor contract, the non-application of labor laws (such as minimum wages), and the aggravation of their poverty due to a lack of agency and representation.
According to independent research, which put the number at 40 million (Srivastava 2011 cited Breman and Kannan 2013), short-term, seasonal, and circular migrants appear to be on the rise. The NSS put the number at around 16 million. A person's social identity, which is determined by caste and places them at the bottom of society, is one of the main factors contributing to vulnerability. This is in addition to the fact that they are economically vulnerable. The OBCs (other backward classes) are a group of people who are classified as being among the poor and vulnerable, including members of the Muslim community, SCs, STs, and other OBC communities. The group is vulnerable on several different levels.
According to Breman (2010), people are defined as a reserve army of labor due to the informality of working conditions. These workers typically come from low-income or backward groups as well as portions of ethnic or religious minorities, which are considered to be socially disadvantaged communities and contingents. Furthermore, they are a part of the rural society's landless or land-poor subclasses. They lack both physical and social capital (low levels of education, accomplishments, and network access that would qualify them for stable and better employment) in their search for employment and income outside of agriculture. They become economically disadvantaged as a result of this situation, both in their new workplaces and in their original locations. They receive no sense of long-term security from such limited and transitory integration into the economy. According to Breman (2010: 4), "at the both ends of their axis of mobility, they are hired only for as long as they are willing and are fit to work, and are fired when there is a downturn in the demand for their labor force or when they have lost their capacity to work.".
The fact that caste and community considerations are taken into account when hiring people for the labor force adds to the complexity of the process. Breman (2010) contends that it's crucial to acknowledge that labor processes are rather complex and cannot be explained in terms of the supply/demand mechanism at work in the formal labor market. Additionally, the presence of labor brokers who act as agents for employers creates a vital link in the flow of footloose labor, making it difficult for them to access other jobs, even in the informal sector, at new work sites. Work-specific segmentation, such as what Breman found in brick kilns, stone quarries, salt pans, and construction sites, he claims, "perpetuates circulation" (2010: 4).
It is also critical to understand that workers who are forced out of agriculture maintain ties to their communities, particularly agriculture, for two reasons: first, they participate in the urban economy only as temporary workers, not as residents, and second, their dependent family members do not follow them when they leave. The initial assumption that the informal sector served as a waiting area for migrants transitioning into the urban economy has been disproven, according to research on the informal economy. Laborers kept getting offered temporary work rather than moving up the labor hierarchy into a more stable job. Additionally, the ongoing influx of job seekers into the already overheated urban economy did not help. The "infinite absorption capacity of the informal sector is a myth," according to Breman (2010:12). A bottom segment of land-poor and landless peasants do not drift freely in the labor market but rather remain trapped as casualized workforce bonded in debt because there is a vastly greater supply of labor than there is a structural demand for this factor of production (Breman 2007; 2010). In such circumstances, the government's social security programs and policies play a critical role in ensuring the survival of India's poor.
Nature of Social Security in India
The National Commission has outlined a "leveling-up" strategy that favors decent employment rights and the introduction of a "social floor" of labor rights and standards, which includes the introduction of a national minimum wage, minimum working conditions, and social security. Three programs were introduced by the government as part of a strategy: the first was the provision of jobs in the public sector; the second was a package of supplemental social security benefits, including health insurance; and the third was social benefits for the poor who are not employed. While insufficient, such provisioning aids in coping with extreme marginality.
Whether government social spending helps to improve the income distribution in developing countries is a question in the current era of globalization. According to (Rudrah 2004), globalization has different effects on different countries, which is why this question is crucial. The spread of markets results in increased inequality because developing nations find it difficult to target their existing social security and health programs toward the underprivileged. In the end, every aspect of a person's life is assessed for economic cost and efficiency. The effective targeting of social security in both developed and developing countries is a major concern for globalization proponents. It is crucial to comprehend this concern in light of rising costs, expanding budget deficits, and rising political sensitivities of "middle-class capture" (Ahmad 1991).
The introduction of social security in India, specifically in relation to health insurance, worker protection, and unemployment relief, dates back to the 1950s, when the constitution endorsed it. The government's efforts were, regrettably, fragmented and included non-legislated benefits to public employees, such as social insurance plans for those employed in the organized sector and social assistance, which included programs like the Employees Provident Fund Act of 1952, the Family Pension Scheme of 1971, the Maternity Benefit Act of 1961, and the Payment of Gratuity Act of 1972. Employment and income guarantees, credit counseling, social insurance programs, unemployment benefit plans, pensions, family allowances, and health care are among the different types of social security programs. The objectives of social security programs are to provide protection for the weak and poor, to lower risk, and to facilitate income redistribution (Ahmad 1991; Kannan 1995; Kannan and Breman 2013; Drese and Sen 1999). The government creates the policies, which are then carried out by the community and local government. It has been argued that the neoliberal state continues to deny benefits, particularly to the elderly (Rajan 2014) and agricultural laborers who work as marginalized labor in the unorganized sector (Guru 2006). Sadly, as argued by Kannan (2007), Kannan and Breman (2013); Kannan and Paola (2007); Jhabvala (1998); and Pillai (1996), the programs implemented were piecemeal efforts because they were unlawfully granted benefits to public employees, who make up a tiny portion of the population. Given that the vast majority of workers in the unorganized sector are not covered by social security programs, such an approach is gravely flawed. In most developing nations, according to Kabeer (2010), only a small, predominately male portion of the workforce employed in the public and private sectors of the economy had access to social security measures. In this situation, the vast majority of workers—women and men alike—were securing their livelihoods in the unofficial sector of the economy, receiving essentially no statutory benefits and being largely invisible in records kept by the government. Further challenges to these interventions came from the institutionalization of neoliberal ideologies that placed a premium on a free market and a liberalized economy, as well as the demise of welfare regimes. As a result, social security policies in developing nations were reframed to be more targeted and specific.
Lack of social protection for working poor people is India's biggest social security policy weakness (NCEUS 2008). For unorganized sector workers, who make up about 90% of the working population and lack any form of social protection, the NCEUS proposed legislation for a national minimum security package. It proposed to extend programs of social insurance, social assistance for life and health insurance, and old age benefits to all workers within a five-year time frame, funded by the federal government, state governments, employers, and employees, at a cost of less than 0 point 5 percent of GDP after five years. The recommendations of the commission were not given statutory backing by the government, and seven years later, nothing has been done about them. According to Breman (2010), the government "shunned" the NCEUS report because it refused to acknowledge that poverty in India is still rife. Initiating populist policies rather than addressing the structural causes is how the government is going about things. The Unorganised Workers' Social Security Act (UWSSA) 2008 does not offer a "national minimum social security" for all unorganized (informal) workers, according to a comment made in NCEUS 2009: 152 in their report. It hasn't had a national or state independent body, nor a fund to pay for the proposed national minimum social security. The politics of economic inclusion have not yet kept pace with the politics of inclusion, the NCEUS declares categorically. In a rapidly developing India, the gap between the neoliberal orthodoxy's dominance in economic policy and the desire of the vast majority for a life of work with dignity and security is becoming more and more obvious.
One of the state-initiated initiatives of the main programme pursued was a National Rural Employment Guarantee, which became a landmark program for giving the working poor employment security. Being the only welfare social security program with a self-selection component, NREGA has a significant contribution to make. It does not prohibit people who are not formally recognized and registered as having a BPL status from participating in public works (Breman and Kannan 2013).
The need for programs like MNREGA to give the landless and landless poor a minimal level of employment security is acknowledged, but neo-liberal proponents criticize such interventions. The World Bank states that a transition to non-agrarian work and income is necessary for overall development in its 2009 World Development Report. According to Breman (2010), the World Bank is leading the group that claims that migration to nonagrarian work and income is necessary due to the pressure on agrarian resources, where the man-to-land ratio is becoming even more unfavorable. However, doing so obscures the precariousness of workers in the urban informal economy (Breman, Guerin, and Prakash 2009). Breman (2010) notes that the World Bank's argument, which criticizes the construction of obstacles to labor mobility, is even more compelling. The World Development Report 2009 considers efforts to expand employment opportunities in rural areas, particularly through government-sponsored programs like MNREGA, to be a waste of time and resources. It claims that such government interventions are unwise because they undermine the free flow of labor.
In Mariganti (et al. (2009) challenges this World Bank stance and contends that MNREGA has a number of advantages. They write, "Media reports since the introduction of the programme indicate that in many areas of the country MNREGA is described by the reports as retarding labor mobility, has enhanced the confidence of rural workers who have intensified MNREGA, the Report effectively disavows such struggle and their (however limited) success in winning a modicum of rights and thereby a spatial advantage of migrants workers. It effectively erases both the (emotional and physical) harms that becoming mobile causes to a large number of people as well as the responsiveness of governments to democratic pressure when this policy and practice are depicted in the Report as being poorly thought out.
The National Commission on Rural Labor (NCRL), which was established in 1991, also argued for the necessity of such a program. Breman (2010:21) cites the NCRL, where it was stated that social security provisions for the workforce in the informal sector of the rural and urban economy were urgently needed. According to NCRL (1991:viii), "the expenditure on social security in India barely accounts for 2.5% of GDP.". It's one of the lowest in the entire world. Only one-tenth of the workforce, the well-organized urban workforce, receives the majority of the social security benefits from this meager allocation. However, it is currently necessary to offer adequate social security to the rural labor force. Various social security programs for rural workers are currently in place in various States, but their scope and coverage are woefully inadequate. In this situation, the MNREGA plays a critical role in ensuring that the sizable rural labor force has some level of social security. The program will be analyzed in the section that follows, and it will be determined to what extent it has addressed the social security concerns of the poor based on the literature already in existence.
Conclusion: Ensuring Livelihood Security:
In order for policymakers to intervene and create a policy that would ensure livelihood security, there are some critical issues that must be addressed before we can conclude the module on social security. According to Breman and Kannan (2013: 26–28), the following factors should be taken into account in order to ensure livelihood security, with human dignity playing a significant role. The first step is to get back into the conversation about the poverty line. Breman and Kannan assert that because of the official poverty line's relatively low threshold, a sizable portion of the weak and disadvantaged population is left out. Second, a significant portion of the underprivileged and vulnerable are left out of the current social security programs. The necessity of a macro-social policy, which would offer an overarching viewpoint on social security interventions in India, is argued for in the third section. Fourth, social security policies should be addressed immediately. A policy prohibiting wages below the minimum wage, minimum working conditions, national minimum social security to cover unforeseen circumstances for workers in the informal sector of the economy, and most importantly, social security for the non-laboring poor, the destitute, and the differently abled, is necessary immediately due to the enormous socio-economic vulnerability crisis. Fifth, social security provisions must be made available to all. It is crucial to understand that restricting social security benefits to the extremely poor could lead to a continuation of rent-seeking at lower levels of bureaucracy. The vast majority of migrant workers who work in the diverse informal economy, particularly seasonal migrants, must be included in the social security system. Seventh, there is a need to reform and restructure the labor administration system, which oversees the execution of various labor laws and programs. Breman and Kannan contend that the implementing agencies' methods exhibit haughtiness and indifference whenever pressure from the intended beneficiaries is absent. The eighth point is that in a democracy like India, it is crucial to acknowledge the value of collective action for and by the poor who are working. Finally, there is a need for a national board to develop best practices, push for better inclusive social policy, monitor and control variation among state level approaches, and negotiate with industry and capital to pressure them to better address issues with the poor and marginalized. Therefore, it is crucial to remember that any program should be planned and implemented with political commitment in order to ensure sustainable social security, as the poor find it extremely difficult to deal with their vulnerability and poverty due to the majority of precarious employment conditions. Therefore, it is urgent to keep up the programs that guarantee the bare minimum of social security.
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