Informal employment in India a study of urban informal sector

Abstract

The current study focused on informal employment, their wages, factors affecting informal employment and assessing vulnerability among informal workers. It analysed the unit-level data of various quinquennial rounds survey (55th for 1999-00, 68th for 2011-12) on Employment and Unemployment and Informal Sector and Conditions of Employment in India and Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), 2018-19 by National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), covering the period from 1999-2000 to 2018-19. The employment and wage growth of informal employment is measured through Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) method and factors affecting informal employment are analysed through binary logistic and multinomial logistic regression techniques. The vulnerability index is developed to measure Vulnerability among informal workers. The analysis revealed a high dominance of self-employed followed by regular and casual workforce in the urban informal sector. The female casual workers, casual workers belonging to Scheduled Caste and manufacturing sector workers got lowest wage rates. Further, female workers, Scheduled Caste (SC) workers, illiterates and construction workers are highly susceptible to job vulnerability, social vulnerability, income vulnerability. Hence, there is a need to restructure and develop the urban informal workers to increase their earnings along with providing basic social security benefits and decent working conditions for them. newline