Alarming rates of Increasing Modern slavery: Survey shows a rise in unpaid women and farm labour.
While the increase in women participation can be taken as a positive sign, most of it comes under the sub-optimal category of unpaid work. 94% women already work in the unorganised informal sector ( according to a report by Human Rights Watch), that is working without a legitimate contract and usually without a payment. The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PFLS) collected this data from the beginning of July 2019 to June 2020. In the data PFLS found the greatest increase in the category of unpaid family workers which refer to people “who live with the proprietor of the unit and work regularly for the unit, but do not have a contract of service and do not receive a fixed sum for the work they perform.”
According to analysts the two specific trends in the survey point out to “household distress precipitated by the steady fall in GDP growth rates over the past year. According to the Indian Express ,The Union labour ministry has attributed the farm labour surge to a hard lockdown in urban areas during April-June, while describing the rebound in female participation as a “positive sign”.
“If you look at the details, you find that this increase is not in good quality work but in the unpaid family work category or the unorganized sector. This is not something to be happy about,” P.C. Mohanan, former acting head of the National Statistical Commission, told The Indian Express.
“Lot of people lost jobs during the pandemic, and agriculture became the employment of last resort… Even though rising education levels have been seen among females, there aren’t enough good jobs for them,” Radhicka Kapoor, Fellow at Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), said to the Indian Express. She clarified, however, that “the distress was brewing before the pandemic struck. GDP had slowed down, demand had declined and manufacturing was not expanding.”
Although India has seen a steady decline in employment in Agriculture, which constitutes 16 percent of the GDP, yet a constant increase in percentage terms of those working in the sector in the year 2019–20 was observed. Obviously, apart from the 45.6% estimated in the report, disguised and child labourers are also found working in the field, oftentimes without time constraints and any legitimate income.
Along with these trends, the 2019–20 survey also shows a decline in the manufacturing and construction industry. The data also shows a surge in the employment rate for unpaid workers in household enterprises in rural and urban areas from 13.3 percent in 2018–19 to 15.9 percent.
When two community leaders talked to the researchers of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in a report in July stating “They don’t give us water. They don’t let us use the bathroom. They don’t let us in the house, and they refuse to touch us. It feels as if all our progress to overcome untouchability has been undone. We feel a similar disregard today, as we felt under those practices” Experts fear a pandemic induced discrimination on the basis of gender and caste.
