Social Security in the Lockdown: A Time to Revisit the NCEUS Recommendations
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Social Security in the Lockdown: A Time to Revisit the NCEUS Recommendations K. P. Kannan1 Published online: 14 September 2020 © Indian Society of Labour Economics 2020
1 Introduction In normal times the meaning of social security is somewhat restricted. It is about the absence or presence of some fallback mechanisms when in distress of one kind or another, as, for example, unemployment, sickness, accident/death, old age, etc. In countries with endemic poverty such as India, social security also refers to such protective schemes as Public Distribution System (PDS) for essential food, mid-day meals for children in schools, supplementary nutrition for children in pre-school age group, public employment and so on. The first set of measures are for meeting situations of adversity, while the second are measures for meeting situations of deficiency. The meaning of social security in the face of lockdown of human activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the horizon into one of generalised insecurity in a country like India with a significant proportion of households that are poor and vulnerable. Lockdown implies instant loss of jobs and therefore, wage/earnings loss. This income loss is permanent for those workers whose wages and incomes are contingent on actual performance of work on a day-to-day basis. Such workers do not enjoy employment security or social security, and they are called informal workers (NCEUS 2008, 2009). As per 2017–18 employment data, they constitute around 370 million workers in the informal sector and a little more than 40 million in the formal sector are employed as informal workers. The former constitutes 80 per cent of the total work force, and the latter constitutes 10 per cent. Since the first lockdown in India was announced on 22 March 2020, those migrant workers who chose to leave their location of work could not get wages even for the month of March. Given the complete lockdown, an overwhelming proportion of workers could not work for the first full month. Since then, lockdown has been announced by the state governments in selected regions and localities within their states. On the whole, it would not be an exaggeration to say that at least 40 per * K. P. Kannan [email protected] 1
Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, India
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The Indian Journal of Labour Economics (2020) 63 (Suppl 1):S139–S144
cent of workers in the informal sector are without jobs and hence, without wages/ incomes. For even those who are working in the formal sector, there have been reports of cuts in salaries and selective layoffs given the financial constraints of the enterprises. But, this sudden insecurity of job and income also became insecurity of living itself for a large number of informal workers and their households. This is the prospect of contamination by COVID-19 and the consequent disability or death or suffering and death due to lack of food and their basic minimum necessities. For the migrant workers—more than 10 million of them is reported
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