Operationalising social protection: Reflections from urban India

Abstract

Chinese

A global pandemic has brought renewed attention to an old question: what do we owe each other? Calls to engage in thinking about a ‘new social contract’ have emerged rooted both in an intimate memory of crisis as well as in the possibilities rooted in relief work, mutual aid and stimulus packages. Scholars have sought to learn, for example, what relief measures could teach us about social protection in a ‘post-pandemic’ world, even while cautioning that socio-economic inequalities were only revealed rather than caused by the pandemic. Drawing on a set of empirical cases collectively produced by researchers (including this author) at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, this article turns to a specific part of any social contract: the design and operation of social protection systems. Within this, it argues that operational modes of delivering social protection need specific attention within scholarly debates, especially in their complexities within the spatial and economic informality that marks cities of the global south. Put simply: how we deliver both existing and new entitlements is as important as deciding what entitlements urban residents should be entitled to. I offer four main operational concerns that mark the delivery of social protection to informal workers in urban India: (a) residence as an operational barrier; (b) workplaces as sites of delivery; (c) working with worker organisations as delivery infrastructures; and (d) building systems of recognition and registration of informal workers.

Keywords

global south informality social protection southern urban practice

Introduction

A global pandemic has brought renewed attention to an old question: what do we owe each other? (Shafik, 2021). Calls to engage in thinking about a ‘new social contract’ (Alfers and Moussié, 2022b) have emerged rooted both in an intimate memory of crisis as well as in the possibilities rooted in relief work, mutual aid and stimulus packages. Scholars have sought to learn, for example, what relief measures could teach us about social protection in a ‘post-pandemic’ world even while cautioning that socio-economic inequalities were only revealed rather than caused by the pandemic (Aajevika Bureau, 2020; Bhan et al., 2020; Devereux, 2021; Leisering 2021; Taylor and McCarthy, 2021). Those writing in and from the cities of the global south have further insisted that the pandemic may have felt ‘universal’, but was experienced differently in New Delhi than in New York, insisting that even structural readings be rooted in place (Caldeira et al., 2020).

In this article, I write within and to this moment. Drawing on a set of empirical cases collectively produced by researchers (including this author) at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, which looked at the experience of informal workers in the pandemic, I return to a specific part of any social contract: the design and operation of social protection systems. I take as a starting point that any re-imagination of the social contract should be based on formulations of transformative social protection (Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler, 2004) that take our collective imagination beyond welfare, social assistance and safety nets towards structures that ensure decent work, enable socio-economic mobility and act as architectures of citizenship. From here, the focus of this Debates article is to suggest that operational modes of delivering transformative social protection need specific attention within scholarly debates, especially in their complexities vis-à-vis the spatial and economic informality of cities in the global south. Put simply: I ask how we deliver both existing and new entitlements, rather than discussing what entitlements urban residents should be entitled to. Operational knowledge¹ is essential to imagine what Simone and Pieterse (2017) once described as ‘grounded and speculative alternatives’ that can generate new forms of what I have elsewhere described as southern urban practice (Bhan, 2019). I assess the space of such operational moves in what I broadly understand as public action, that is, actions led by the state even as it expands its partnership and networks to deliver entitlements with a range of other actors.

As analyses on practice must do, I root my analysis in a specific geography – urban India. In doing so, I recognise the urban not just as a location where social protection is delivered but equally as a structure that fundamentally changes its delivery, just as I continue to insist that this effect happens differently in different forms of urbanism. I further focus on the delivery of social protection entitlements to one kind of recipient, that is, workers in the informal economy, who face particular challenges in accessing social protection because of the nature of their work and workplaces and the terms of their presence in the city.

I proceed as follows. The next two sections describe what I mean by treating ‘urban India’ as the location of my arguments and then articulate my understanding of spatial and economic informality qua social protection. The fourth and main section then offers several points of reflection on how urbanism shapes the operation of social protection systems in urban India. It does so across four themes: (a) residence as an operational barrier; (b) workplaces as sites of delivery; (c) working with worker organisations as delivery infrastructures; and (d) building systems of recognition and registration of informal workers. A concluding note marks what remains unresolved, and where to go from here.

A note on location: Urban India

For the purposes of this article, I use ‘urban India’ to mark a set of broad characteristics about Indian urbanisation. Some of these, arguably, are shared by many cities across the global south, while others mark the region’s specificities. The first is a dominance of informal employment. Nearly 88% of all workers in India are classified as informal workers, about evenly split between own-account workers and informal wage workers (ILO-WIEGO, 2018). This means that they work without work contracts or enterprise registration and, importantly, lack access to labour entitlements such as paid leave as well as rights against arbitrary termination. Construction, domestic, street vending, waste, para-transit and home-based work are the dominant ‘sectors’, as they are colloquially called, of such urban informal work. In India, some government commissions (National Commission for Employment in the Unorganised Sector [NCEUS], 2009) have, in fact, defined informal workers as precisely those who lack job, income and social security, making them an ideal demographic within which to assess social protection regimes. The second characteristic is that a significant number – and often a majority – of urban residents live in some tension with official logics of law, property, tenure and planning, that is, their homes are considered variously unauthorised, informal or illegal. The simplest (but far from only) marker of this spatial informality is the informal settlement or ‘slum’, but it is important to note that this transversal relationship with law marks even elite housing in Indian cities. Taken together, I refer to these first two characteristics as spatial and economic urban informality, and, in this article, I assess what it means to deliver social protection within these structural conditions.

The third characteristic is that India remains one of the lesser urbanised regions of the world. Officially, India is 34% urban, and even expansive definitions put this figure at only 50–55% (Jana et al., 2018). Indian urban scholars have argued that the agrarian question, i.e. the production of space in rural areas as well as lives lived leveraging the rural and the urban, remains dominant in any understanding of Indian urbanisation (Gururani, 2020). This is particularly true of social protection, where rural areas have access to social protection schemes – such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee or the National Rural Health Mission – largely unavailable to urban residents. The fourth characteristic is that India, for complex historical reasons, has relatively weak municipal governance across funds, functions as well as functionaries. Structures of urban and rural governance are sharply demarcated in the country, and decentralisation to local governance has been stronger in rural areas than in urban (Idiculla, 2020; Sivaramakrishnan, 2013, 2014). The final characteristic is that, socially, the urban in India – like the rural but in different manifestations – remains marked strongly by group-based identity, stratification and belonging (Desai and Dubey, 2011), including in the structure of constitutional rights and the delivery of social protection where entitlements are often held by groups and not just individuals (Jayal, 2013).² It is these characteristics taken together, rather than just geography, that I refer to when I speak of rooting debates on social protection within spatial and economic informality in ‘urban India’.

Social protection and informality

Four inter-related questions arise when thinking of social protection. The first is what its goals are: what is social protection meant to achieve? The second is what it entails: what entitlements one should get? The third is the basis on which these entitlements are claimed: who should get them? The fourth is their delivery: how they should get them? My focus in this article is on the latter two. Yet, before proceeding, I want to outline, briefly, my starting normative and theoretical positions on the first two questions.

I write towards the delivery of what scholars have called transformative social protection. Writing nearly two decades ago in a now foundational paper, Stephen Devereux and Rachel Sabates-Wheeler (2004) distinguished between what they called protective or preventive social protection versus transformative social protection. Protective measures provide relief against deprivation, composed mostly of ‘narrowly targeted safety net measures’ that often seek to reach the most vulnerable. Preventive measures seek to ‘prevent deprivation’, such as health insurance. In the early 2000s, these forms dominated social protection practice. Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler (2004) argued that both of these were ‘economic rather than social protection’ and, in their focus on relief and preventing livelihood shocks, they were ‘hardly socially transformative’ (p. 1). They urged a move towards promotive or transformative social protection that instead sought ‘policies that relate to power imbalances in society that encourage, create and sustain vulnerabilities’ (Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler, 2004: 9). This, they argued, was about ‘social equity’, and went beyond income transfers and protection against deprivation to ‘enhance the social status and rights of the marginalised’ (Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler, 2004: 9). This would mean, for example, taking anti-discrimination law or supporting collective action for workers’ rights as seriously as public food systems and cash transfers. Recent formulations of social protection like the ILO’s position on decent work that covers ‘opportunities, rights, social protection and social dialogue’ (Trebilcock, 2005) make similar moves (International Labour Organisation, n.d.). For this article, what this means is that I am equally concerned about how to operationalise the delivery of newer transformative entitlements – such as rent, which I discuss below – as I am about the political implications of different modes of delivery on citizenship, which I will return to when I discuss the choices between delivering entitlements to ‘citizens’ or to ‘workers’.

Much of my focus will remain, however, on asking how informal workers should be recognised within social protection systems and how entitlements should be delivered to them. Writing on informal workers and social protection has often described the former as the ‘missing middle’ caught between contributory social protection due to formal workers based on their occupational status (social security) and non-contributory entitlements given to citizens on the basis of their vulnerability (social assistance; Alfers et al., 2018; Lund, 2020). Informal workers have historically not been included in such definitions of ‘workers’ and, as I argued earlier, in India they have at times been defined precisely as those workers who lack such protection (NCEUS, 2009). They have historically then, as Rina Agarwala (2008) argues: (a) approached the state rather than employers; and (b) done so as citizens rather than workers.

Addressing this can either mean expanding the definition of ‘worker’ to include informal workers (which has occurred in India, where, for example, construction workers have been recognised as workers under a specific piece of legislation) or providing a wider set of benefits under the social protection available to all ‘citizens’ regardless of their work status. Responding to this debate, Laura Alfers and Rachel Moussié (2022b: 108) have argued against a move to the ‘universal’ based on citizenship through, say, basic income grants. Informal workers, they argue, need ‘access to both citizen-centered protections and public services’ as well as ‘work-related social protection’. Their arguments in part emphasise that for precarious informal workers, risks to income occur from the absence both of work-based entitlements, and of social services and infrastructure such as health insurance or basic protections such as subsidised food. This article will follow this argument, adding to it that the necessity of work-based recognition is critical not just to frame entitlements but to ensure that social protection remains as centrally about political agency and citizenship as about socio-economic mobility.

The final theoretical location and my entry point in this article is on the operation of social protection systems. Scholars have long argued that the nature of urban poverty and vulnerability requires a re-articulation of social protection systems that, especially in the global south, were largely designed for rural contexts (Gentilini, 2015; Gentilini et al., 2020). This is certainly true of India. Yet if social protection is to now urbanise, it must not simply transplant rural social protection programmes but create what Devereux and Cuesta (2021) call ‘urban-sensitive social protection’.

One part of doing so is to understand the specific conditions of delivering urban social protection within social and economic informality. On these debates in particular, scholars have looked at trade-offs between entitlements in kind versus cash transfers of different types (Ladhani and Sitter, 2020) or insurance-based products; considered the role of technology in delivering entitlements (du Toit, 2004; Khera and Patibandla, 2020; Masiero, 2020; Meagher, 2021); debated privatisation versus what I have framed above as public action (Standing, 2007); sought to understand portability of benefits for multi-local and migrant workers (Aajevika Bureau, 2020; Srivastava, 2020); and have argued for the need of co-production with workers in ensuring effective delivery (Alfers and Moussié, 2022b).

Below, I offer four thematics that sit within this literature and draw its focus deeper into specific conditions in cities of the global south for informal workers. The first theme is of residence as an operational barrier, where I look beyond the question of migration and mobility and focus on those ordinarily resident in cities but in conditions of spatial informality. The second turns the focus on using workplaces of informal workers as sites of delivery. The third speaks to literatures on co-production assessing what COVID-19 has taught us on the possibilities of scaling work with worker organisations. The fourth assesses how to operationalise systems of recognition and enumeration of workers so that they may avail social protection benefits.

Delivering social protection to informal workers

Residence as an operational barrier

In a survey of 501 domestic workers conducted by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) in the north Indian city of Jaipur (Chowdhury et al., 2020; Sampat et al., 2022), the average age of residence in the city was 18 years. Despite this long term of residence, while 84% possessed the national government’s unique digital Aadhar identification card, only 33% possessed local identification – a food card that would entitle them to subsidised ration, a household identification that would qualify them for other social protection schemes or even an election card that would entitle them to vote. This is not for lack of trying – these are metropolitan, well-informed and unionised workers. The difficulty in securing local identification is one of proving not citizenship or eligibility but residence.

Operationally, citizenship-based social protection requires residence – the ability to claim what is colloquially known in India as ‘proof of address’ in addition to ‘proof of identity’. Yet most domestic workers – like most informal workers – live either on rent without any written agreements (91% of this sample) or in informal settlements not recognised as legitimate addresses. It is important to understand that their length of residence and their own self-identification mean that they are not ‘migrants’. Instead, they are in a sense of ‘permanent temporariness’ (Hilal and Petti, 2019) caused by an urban condition where legal, affordable and adequate housing are impossible for most workers. It is the condition of their housing that renders them outside social protection. The question of residence within social protection has often been read with a strong focus on migrant and non-citizen workers. Yet, given that insecurity of tenure and illegitimacy of presence define urban life for many in the auto-constructed cities of the global south (Caldeira, 2017), equal attention needs to be paid to those ordinarily resident in cities of the global south that are still unable to access social protection.

What further complicates this spatial informality for informal workers specifically is that they are unable to mitigate its effects through identification or paperwork certifying employment that a formal employee in a garment factory, for example, may be able to at least attempt. They remain therefore excluded both from attaining either work status or residence status. Spatial informality fractures the ‘universal’ of social protection operationally – even if entitlements exist, they cannot be accessed. It also, critically, both places high costs as well as lowers access to possibilities of some forms of co-production, as uncertainty in tenure creates conditions of what Vanessa Watson once described as ‘deep difference’ (Watson, 2006) that entrench power differentials among actors (including the state) who seek to work together. In this case, many workers are not considered legitimate residents at all, limiting the possibilities of co-production with the state.

Longer-term structural changes necessitate that no one’s presence in the city should be marked by uncertain tenure and thus mandate a range of upgrading and regularisation schemes. Yet, in the immediate operational reality, one way to address such exclusion would be to think of eligibility criteria within social protection systems that acknowledge and seek to address the difficulty of establishing residence. Policy developments in urban India on access to services have slowly begun to de-link residence and access, that is, furnishing proof of legal or secure residence is no longer required to access public services such as electricity, water supply or sanitation. Electricity has done so to the greatest extent. An amendment to the Electricity Act in 2003 allowed applications for service connections ‘irrespective of status of tenure of the household’, permitting, therefore, a household residing in an informal settlement to obtain a metered connection (Ministry of Law and Justice, 2003). Similar expansion has been seen in, for example, the Government of India’s flagship Swachh Bharat (Clean India) scheme that offers public funding and support to households for the building of indoor toilets regardless of the tenure status of their household. Not all services have moved this far – access to individual piped water within the home remains the most contested service to access from within spatial informality. Such shifts in policy around access to infrastructure and services have much to teach us operationally about social protection – does one use the language of amendments to the Electricity Act and explicitly acknowledge and address insecure tenure? Does one tacitly expand such access like in Swachh Bharat? Other questions then rapidly follow: how could renters be included and on what terms? Would more meaningful social protection first require a system of recognition and registration of renters? Can such recognition exist if the ‘owner’ of the house themselves is not fully legal? Could economic recognition as a worker be leveraged to undercut the effect of spatial informality? Could it pave the way to a recognition of a legitimate spatial presence in the city that would qualify as residence and enable access to social protection?

Precedents to establish residence, specifically to enable access to social protection programmes even if they cannot fully address insecure tenure, could draw from tax law, jurisprudence and even Census definitions of residence. Along with others, I have argued elsewhere, for example, that eligibility to social protection schemes should be conceptualised based on the principle of the intent to reside (Bhan et al., 2017). This principle seeks to include urban residents as early as possible after their arrival in the city by both expanding the list of ways to prove residence and using existing policy and legal frameworks to establish 180 days as the threshold for inclusion. It has precedence in Indian jurisprudence as well as other state policies that could make it a pragmatic option. Another on-going experiment in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu is to create a registry of rental housing that does not distinguish between formal and informal rental, and keeps the quantum of information low enough to not discourage informal rental practices from being registered for fear of negative visibility by the state (Harish and Lala, 2020). Each of these practices seeks operational solutions to incrementally enhance access to social protection in the near term, finding ways of moving within structural constraints that will change with a longer temporality.

Workplaces as sites of delivery

Smita Srinivas (2010) offers a useful framework in thinking about social protection that centres around work, place and workplace. The latter category represents a particular history of social protection within industrial, North Atlantic capitalism where work-related social protection was given, for example, to workers (work) by employers at a factory or an office (workplace). For formal workers, this remains the system today where it is the employer, under regulation by the state, who is the delivery agent for entitlements.³ Can workplaces act as sites of delivery for social protection for informal workers?

In May and June 2021, as the third wave of COVID-19 lockdowns set in, a set of non-governmental organisations, individuals, movements and worker organisations banded together in New Delhi as part of a mutual aid effort to provide working households with food.⁴ The network reached 76,000 households over two months, making it one of the largest non-state relief efforts in the pandemic. One of the reasons for its success was the presence in the network of organisations of informal workers such as, to take one example, four federations of waste workers in the city. The federations understood the spatiality of waste work. They knew that waste workers tend to live together in housing settlements both as a marker of caste-based structural exclusion but also as a strategy to leverage shared public space for storage, sorting and recycling, thereby again showing the permeability of home and work. They also knew the workplaces of waste workers from the large landfills as well as the smaller, neighbourhood-scale sites. Food delivery was thus spatialised between spaces of home and of work, creating a delivery system that was effective and reached workers where they were, with minimal disruption to their working lives. Other members of the network employed similar strategies – delivering not to homes but to labour chowks where casual workers are hired for daily wage work, in natural markets where vendors congregate, the peripheries of industrial areas and clusters tacitly known to house a high density of home-based workers.

Targeting informal workers spatially by using the workplace as a site of the delivery of social protection offers a key operational innovation. The workplace, as Srinivas (2010) reminds us, was precisely the site of delivering social protection when it was, for example, the factory and the site where employee met employer. Informal workplaces do not share the same dynamic and each sector has a different spatial form of workplace. Yet they undoubtedly offer sites where workers are present, can be found and can be registered and connected to social protection systems.

What then prevents the use of workplaces of informal workers as sites for delivery of social protection? A significant operational barrier is the recognition of informal workplaces in regulatory instruments like state policies and spatial plans. Master Plans in Indian cities, for example, rarely meaningfully reference the workplaces of informal workers. Where limited acknowledgement does exist, it is not followed by what planning is meant to offer: recognition of presence, meaningful representation in a form of urban governance and equitable access to space, resources and infrastructure. Operationalising meaningful access to social protection for informal workers requires the spatial recognition of their workplaces, both in public space (streets, landfills, transport exchanges, natural markets, construction sites among others) and as well as in private space (their own or other people’s homes). Specific planning practices that can do so have been described in detail elsewhere both by scholars (see e.g. Harrison et al., 2018) as well as by advocacy campaigns such as the Main Bhi Dilli (I, Too, Am Delhi) campaign that has sought to integrate informality into Delhi’s upcoming Master Plan 2041 (Main Bhi Dilli, n.d.)

One way, in fact, to ensure that work-related demands do not vanish into ‘universal’ social protection, as Alfers and Moussié have cautioned against, is to use workplaces as key sites of delivery to reach informal workers (Alfers and Moussié, 2022a: 2). Doing so requires two other elements of the social protection system to work alongside: recognition of workers and partnership with institutions that are present in these workplaces, such as the federation of waste workers described in the example above. I turn to these next.

Worker organisations as institutions anchoring delivery

Who should deliver social protection? So far, I have described how, for informal workers, the institution of delivery has been, by default rather than intention, the state rather than the employer. The state’s record in urban India, however, is a patchwork and frayed safety net. This can be both a matter of intent and of capacity, given that one of the characteristics of urban India that this article started with was precisely the weaknesses in structures of local and municipal urban government.⁵ This means that, operationally, we must ask: while holding onto the centrality of public action and the role of the state in the delivery of social protection, what possible institutional structures lie outside it that could also be effective partner institutions for the co-production and delivery of social protection to informal workers? Such institutions are not meant, in any way, to be substitutes for the state’s central role in social protection but pragmatic responses to thinking of additional pathways of delivery that can repair a patchwork safety net. One such type of institution, for example, could be worker organisations, including unions, membership-based organisations, collectives and federations.

In recent work, researchers at IIHS assessed the role of non-state actors in providing relief during the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant lockdowns in 2020–2021 (Bhan et al., 2022). We looked at 58 different kinds of non-state actors, including individuals, individuals in support with organisations, non-profit organisations, citizen collectives, labour unions, volunteer organisations, social impact organisations, housing rights advocacy groups and citizen technology platforms. We argued that the scale of relief work during the pandemic offers strong evidence that non-state actors represent an infrastructure that can hold the delivery of social protection. Non-state actors did not just ‘fill gaps’ or ‘close the last mile’ in relief work – they established meso-level structures that followed the entire cycle of identifying beneficiaries, deciding entitlements and then, finally, delivering them, much like the New Delhi food relief network we described earlier. This suggests a different scale of co-production of social protection systems, where non-state actors play an infrastructural role rather than just partnering in localised, last-mile efforts. In many places, in fact, these actors were the only relief infrastructure present.

Of particular interest to this article is that our report found that membership-based organisations of workers – unions and collectives of informal workers – were one of the most effective institutions in providing relief. They were able to respond the fastest, to adapt and customise relief, to be accountable to their members, to engage in multiple forms of relief as well as to deploy administrative capabilities at scale. They were also the organisations that members turned to, indicating a sense of ownership and claims-making that bodes well for social protection systems. They did so, importantly, despite the state which acknowledged but did not recognise, support or regulate these relief efforts.

This broad finding was reinforced by our direct involvement with a large union of domestic workers in Jaipur called the Rajasthan Mahila Kamgar Union (RMKU).⁶ During COVID-19, the Union engaged precisely as our report had suggested. Members reached out to union leadership rather than to the state or elected officials, suggesting a trust and accountability structure. The Union, in turn, mobilised in multiple ways. It ensured that those domestic workers with cards for the public food system were able to access the expanded government food relief despite lockdown restrictions. For the majority of domestic workers that did not have food cards, it partnered with relief efforts to direct non-state food relief to its workers, taking up the task of identifying workers, supplying lists and information to mutual aid networks and physically managing last-mile distribution. When the state government of Rajasthan, where Jaipur is located, announced cash relief for residents, the Union compiled a list of over 2000 domestic workers with their bank accounts (that the Union had helped workers open pre-pandemic), thus providing the state with a database of informal workers it did not have. Crisis cash transfers followed, making Jaipur one of the few sites were domestic workers received relief based on their occupational status. The Union also directly intervened in some cases of rent-based eviction threats, arguing with landlords that pandemic evictions were unacceptable, as well as with employers that withheld wages.

International federations of workers like WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment Globalising and Organising) have long argued that worker organisations are able to co-produce social protection outcomes in partnership with the state, and have documented multiple examples of worker organisations doing so during COVID-19 (Alfers and Moussié, 2022b; Chikarmane and Narayanan, 2023). India has some of the world’s largest membership-based organisations of informal workers across diverse forms of informal employment. Yet a mutually enabling regulatory framework does not exist where the state recognises these worker organisations as infrastructures of delivery for social protection, limiting the scale of partnership and co-production. Creating regulatory frameworks that are specifically designed to enable incorporation for collectives of informal workers, recognising existing collectives formally and entering partnerships for the participatory design and delivery of social protection systems could be the basis of repairing existing patchwork urban safety nets.

It is critical that such partnerships be one of sharing resources and authority and not just responsibility, the latter being a form of state abdication. None of the worker organisations we spoke to in our research sought to replace the state – each argued, in fact, that the state’s presence in social protection must be deeper and stronger. The question is one of incrementally moving forward to that role while still supporting workers in what could be a fairly long ‘interim’. We have described elsewhere in more detail what such state support could look like (Bhan et al., 2022).

Enabling those membership-based organisations of informal workers that want to become key agents in delivering social protection not just increases efficiency of delivery, it also, as Alfers and Moussié (2022b) argue, builds spaces for social dialogue, or the ability of workers to politically engage with the state to determine the structure of social protection. They outline the many ways in which informal worker organisations have mobilised and strengthened their capacity to negotiate and enter into meaningful social dialogue in the past decades, suggesting the possibility of these organisations playing stronger roles in transformative social protection systems along with, rather than against or in place of, the state. This then becomes one more way in which, while expanding the delivery of social protection, we continue to centre the recognition of informal workers as workers and not just citizens.

Worker organisations and the organisational life of workers

One important distinction in thinking about institutions is to acknowledge the difference between worker organisations and organisations that workers are part of. The difference between the two in the Indian context is often significant precisely because work in India is inextricably connected with identity. Caste, religion and gender – autonomously and in their intersections – determine conditions of work within Indian society. They shape the kind of work people do (and have or don’t have the opportunity to do), the ways in which workers are identified and hired, as well as the ways in which they are able to be socially and politically active not just as workers but as citizens belonging to different social groups. They also, importantly, shape where workers live. Researchers have established that caste and religion shape both micro- and macro-level segregation in Indian cities and create settlements that are often of singular communities or specific intra-settlement patterns of identity-based spatial differentiation (Bharathi et al., 2018). In other words, the ‘public’, the ‘worker’ and the ‘citizen’– just like the universal in the previous section – are not unmarked categories, and challenge the idea of the ‘universal’ in their own ways.

For the purposes of this article, what matters deeply is that they also shape the associational and organisational life of workers. Many informal workers organise not just around work status but around caste, religion, region, language and gender. Such identity-based organisations do not define themselves as worker organisations, unions or collectives yet are a critical part of the associational life of workers. They must, then, equally be considered as possible institutional infrastructures for the delivery of social protection. These institutions share precisely the same features that make membership-based organisations of workers effective: systems of trust, mutual recognition and accountability, large-scale membership and a rootedness in the everyday spaces and lives of members. Indeed, many of these organisations are already involved in social protection work for their communities, though with a greater focus on social services like health and education.

The federations of waste workers that were part of the Delhi food relief network are a perfect example. When they speak of the concerns of their members, they do so not just as workers but also as workers belonging to particular social communities. Though far from easy to do in practice, expanding and aligning worker organisations with organisations that workers belong to could have tremendous potential benefits to enhance their capacity for social dialogue. Even without such alignment, however, a system that works with both kinds of organisations can greatly enhance its effectiveness in reach and delivery of social protection, once again slowly filling in the patchwork that exists today.

Worker registration systems

The RMKU’s pandemic-time effort to get a database of domestic workers to the state is emblematic of a larger operational challenge of social protection systems within economic informality. The Government of Delhi, as alluded to earlier, faced equal challenges trying to get entitlements – in this case, cash transfers – to construction workers, transport workers and street vendors in Delhi simply because adequate databases of workers did not exist.

What would building such a database look like? This is a difficult question that strikes at the heart of debates on the terms of recognition and visibility from within informality – spatial or economic – to the market or the state. Such recognition can seem critical for social protection where being seen by the state and appearing in its databases is essential. Yet recognition – one part of ‘formalisation’– comes at its own risks. It could, for example, bring costs, norms and standards that informal workers (or informal housing) are unable or unwilling to take on. Andries du Toit (2004) has written extensively on ‘adverse incorporation’ and Kate Meagher (2021: 4) cautions against the risk of ‘infrastructures of inclusion’ that ‘increase rather than reduce precarity’. Formalisation is not a simple flicking of a switch from one status to another. The terms of formalisation and its specific components matter, and no process of formalisation is without both gains and losses (Women in Informal Employment Globalising and Organising, n.d.). Recognition is a subset of formalisation, but here too, the terms of recognition must be specific. At stake, then, is not just a technical question of building databases but one of rooting such ‘socio-technical linkages’ and understanding their ‘regulatory and distributive effects’ (Meagher, 2021).

Let us take an example. The Government of India has recently launched E-Shram, a digital identification for workers (Ministry of Labour and Employment, n.d.). In urban India, worker identification has been sector-specific within the informal economy – waste workers, construction workers, street vendors and transport workers have made strides in being able to gain state identification as workers, while domestic workers and home-based workers have struggled. E-Shram is a universal identification for all kinds of workers. Important in its terms of recognition, and the main reason many worker organisations are currently supporting the initiative despite lingering concerns, is that it allows a self-declaration of occupation. This self-declaration does not require verification from an employer or the furnishing of proof. Self-declaration without verification or documentary substantiation has been one of the key demands from informal worker organisations as a necessary form of recognition. Since its launch, over 250 million workers have already registered.⁷

It is unclear what E-Shram will do. At the moment, enrolling for the card has only one linked entitlement – an automatic insurance cover against injury and death at the workplace. However, the popularity of the platform means that it is possible to link other social protection platforms to E-Shram, an identification centred squarely on work status that is inclusive of informal work. The digital nature of the identification makes it portable, and if data-sharing protocols between central and state governments as well as between state governments are established, E-Shram could enable portability of benefits for mobile and migrant workers. At the time of writing, the Supreme Court of India has innovated with E-Shram as a form of delivery of social protection to illustrate such possibilities. In an on-going case, titled In re: Problems and Miseries of Migrant Workers (2023), which began as a plea to protect migrant workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Court has ordered that all workers with E-Shram registration who do not have access to food cards under India’s National Food Security Act must be enrolled into the scheme immediately. This is an example of a database of informal workers that offers itself as a way to operationalise the delivery of what is usually considered a universal social protection entitlement, that is, subsidised, state-provided food (Bharadwaj, 2023).

Yet as E-Shram and other technical assemblages for recognition roll out, it is also imperative to think about the governance structures under which such technology-enabled systems are being produced. India does not have adequate legislative frameworks to regulate data privacy, a concern that has cast doubt over the use of identification databases (Alonso et al., 2023). Both scholars and activists have argued that technological solutions in governance must pay equal attention to questions of privacy, accountability and exclusion (Khera and Patibandla, 2020). What could be ‘traceable socio-technical linkages’– to use Meagher’s (2021: 11) phrase – that are transparent, accountable and visible to workers so that the terms of recognition (with their risks and rewards) are more clearly known?

Conclusion

I have argued in this article that it is imperative that we pay deeper attention to the operational modes of delivery of social protection for informal workers by asking how particular urban conditions prevent substantive access to rights and entitlements. Operational questions, I have hoped to show, are distinct from more macro debates about the structure of economic growth or the political economy of welfare regimes. Holding operations to be as important as these macro-debates is essential if we are to remain committed not just to new frameworks but also to more effective and equitable forms of practice. One of the reasons that social protection should be transformative is not just because it is conceptually expansive but also, to put it simply, because it finds ways to work, repair and renew. It is transformative, in other words, precisely because it is able to deliver in extremely difficult institutional and urban environments that require both equity and efficiency at scale.

Indeed, in urban India especially with its history of patchwork safety nets, if even existing protective social protection entitlements were delivered more equitably, transformation would begin even without any expanded set of entitlements. For this, transformative practices need deep empirical specificity – not just at the national level but in particular city-regions even as patterns or approaches of practices may be common. This then is a space of theorising what forms of experiments, practices and innovations may take us closer to realising transformative social protection, and the systems and institutions that could get us there. I see these experiments as forms of what I have described elsewhere as the southern urban practices of patchwork and repair that recognise that the scale of vulnerability in cities of the global south means that the time between the present and a future marked by structural change cannot be without incremental practices that move us towards desired long-term horizons (Bhan, 2019, 2022). Indeed, these incremental practices may be part of what we need to reach these horizons at all.

The four themes I have offered in this Debates article are not exhaustive but are illustrative of the ways in which an urban location shapes the delivery of social protection for informal workers. I have focused e specially on how conditions of spatial and economic informality affect the delivery of social protection, but larger questions such as the role of technology, the shift in the form of entitlements between direct provision versus insurance products or cash transfers and the role of market and private actors are on-going debates that will also shape the delivery of social protection for informal workers. Further, looking at other sectors and the changing nature of formal and informal work – platform and gig work, for example (Surie, 2018) – will, I hope, add to as well as amend the observations in this article, as will more in-depth assessments within a particular sector. The arguments of this article also focus more on informal wage workers, and, particularly operationally, more specific thought needs to be given to own-account/self-employed workers and workers in micro- and small informal enterprises.

My understanding of the urban India is also particular – questions of social protection apply well beyond the set of characteristics I introduced earlier in this article as ‘urban India’. How do informal work and social protection interface in emergent urban forms such as urban corridors, special economic zones or peri-urban interfaces of expanding regions? How do they shift beyond metropolitan urbanisation as we look at smaller urban towns and urbanising villages? In each case, new operational questions will arise that deserve deeper and more sustained attention, as well as experiments in practice. In addition, other regions in the world, particular other cities in the global south, will have different operational challenges. While I have written from urban India, my hope is that others will identify the specific forms of operational barriers that exist in their urban contexts and seek practices that address them that may be incremental or macro-structural, or both.

Advocates for transformative social protection must continue to fight to expand the nature of entitlements within social protection. They must do so not just so that social protection can go beyond the provision of basic needs towards combating forms of structural inequality, but also because new forms of risk are constantly emerging. Today, these may be exposure to heat, urban flooding and other forms of disaster risk; the impact of technology and artificial intelligence on existing forms of informal work; or the increase in climate refugees crossing borders. New forms of risk will push the envelope of what is needed to ensure the dignity of urban residents and workers. This means constantly challenging the basket of entitlements within urban social protection, arguing equally for rent as well as food, workplace protections as well as a minimum wage, climate resilience as well as health insurance, skills as well as minimum income and access to the internet as well as pension support. Yet we must remember that these too will raise new questions of delivery. So, as we argue for more inclusive economic structures that seek to move to transformative social protection, one set of eyes must remain on older and continuing operational questions that need a distinct disposition, scholarship and practice.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the very helpful comments of the three reviewers of this article. I would also like to acknowledge the feedback of Anant Maringanti on early drafts of the piece.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Gautam Bhan

Notes

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