Recently, Kalavati, a mother of seven girls and two sons, from Jalka village in Yavatmal district, Maharashtra, caught the attention of the media and the public when Rahul Gandhi, Member of Parliament, mentioned her situation in the Parliament. Kalavati threatened to end her life if she did not get her land and money back from those who took these away. She was worried about how to feed her children. Her husband, Parshuram, ended his life on 23 December 2005, unable to pay back his mounting debt.

Millions of women and men in India are not as fortunate as the ill-fated Kalavati, whose plight was highlighted in the highest forum of the country. According to the latest estimates of the World Bank on global poverty, India had 456 million people or about 42 per cent of the population living below the new international poverty line of $1.25 per day, constituting 33 per cent of the global poor. A simple question posed is, “Are they poor because they are not working?” About 92 per cent of the country’s workforce, according to NSSO 2004-05, is employed in the informal, or unorganised, economy. People are plagued by poverty and hunger not because they are not working, but because they work hard and yet the income they earn is not sufficient to meet their basic necessities.

Much was expected for the unorganised workforce in the 2008-09 budget to be presented by the Union finance minister, P Chidambaram. These 423 million, who contribute 62 per cent of the country’s total GDP, were privileged with only one per cent allocation in the national budget. Of great dismay is the fact that the 2008-09 budget of the UPA has completely ignored expenditure on the social security of unorganised workers by allocating only 5 crores for their benefit.

The current budget is considered a populist budget, with goody-goody announcements of direct benefits for farmers, women, minorities, SCs and STs, etc. Labour File explores the budget and its impact on various sectors, especially the ‘goodness’ of the so-called positive benefits announced in the budget.

“Why is public provisioning for the social security for workers, especially the unorganised workers, in India so ridiculously low?” questions J John in the cover story, ‘Public Provisioning on Social Security for Unorganised Workers: Critical Concerns’. Highlighting the insufficient budget allocation for unorganised workers, he points out that provision of social security for some has become the justification for denial for many. The article raises a major concern that social security for the workers is not seen as a right, to which they are entitled, but as something to be accomplished as a consequence of economic development. Though the overall spirit of the Constitution of India guarantees social security measures to the unorganised workers, it does not make it mandatory for the state to provide it as a right.

The budget has allocated Rs 16,000 crores for the NREGS, to be implemented in all 596 rural districts of India. The money made available to implement NREGA falls far short of the amount required. Even the little obtained is diverted as wages to non-workers or is spent on wasteful investments, establishes KS Gopal, in his article, ‘NREGA and the Budget’. Despite the rhetoric of conferring a historic right to employment, the government has not allocated an adequate budget to make this right real. The excuse given is that there was no need for it because the scheme is demand-driven.

Debates on budgetary policies related to women’s work seldom treat the statistical invisibility of women’s work in the care economy or the unpaid economic activity of women at the household and community levels. In ‘Invisibility of Women’s Work in Budgeting’, Lekha Chakraborty writes that the seriousness of the failure to meaningfully pursue gender budgeting for women workers is obvious when one analyses the Statement of Gender Budgeting published in the union budget for 2008-09, with no budgetary allocation under the Ministry of Labour and Employment specifically targeted for women workers.

This year’s budget has been touted as an election budgetmaking the opposition fretful, whereas government supporters are exhilarated. Pratyush Chandra, in his article, ‘Debt Waiver and Rural Labour’, explores the phenomenon of loan waivers and expresses his concern that with the land question remaining unresolved and productive resources being inaccessible to the vast majority, the loans will be used to satisfy meagre consumption needs, in the wake of the massive underemployment of the rural poor.

Economic empowerment through employment-cum-income generation activities is one of the ultimate objectives of the state and the same should be the focus for the dalit community, to make them economically independent and self-reliant. Effective budgeting can bring about a shift in occupational structure, improvements in access to land and capital, and development of good educational and employment opportunities for dalits, reflects Ananth S Panth in ‘Dalits, Employment and Budgets’. This, according to him, could bring a change in the levels of poverty in the rural and urban areas, which, in turn, will be indicative of a general improvement in the economic situation of the SC population.

Various opinions have been expressed across the country before and after the pronouncement of Budget 2008-2009. Labour File, in ‘A Populist Budget? Responses to the Union Budget 2008-09’, has attempted to capture the responses of various stakeholders such as trade unions, political organisations, NGOs, etc., on the budget.

Reviewing the Study, ‘Impact of Organised Retailing on the Unorganised Sector’, by ICRIER, Sujana Krishnamoorthy establishes that not much policy attention has been paid to improve supply chains for the unorganised. East Asian economies such as Singapore and even China in recent years have undertaken policy measures to modernise and support the unorganised retail sector, and the markets that cater to them, without seeking to reduce them in any way. She emphasises that if measures are not taken, we might well land up in the situation that developed economies find themselves in today — a behemoth organised sector and belated attempts to preserve an extinct species, the neighbourhood kirana store.

In his review of the book, Labour Vulnerability and Debt Bondage in Contemporary India, Pratyush Chandra finds that with the development of capitalist relations in India, bondage has increasingly lost its earlier permanent and generational nature, and has become more and more temporary, seasonal and individualised. He argues that the public policy and legal state machinery that are in place to identify and eradicate bondage are unable to record and influence its reproduction of the work process that characterises the neo-liberal regime of accumulation, resulting in an increased labour vulnerability, leading to a system of neo-bondage.

This issue of Labour File also carries three special features on the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) Ltd. National development has lately been the subject of much focus and has especially been concerned with the issues of dispossession, displacement and rehabilitation. We take the opportunity here to look briefly at these issues vis-à-vis the NTPC. Sukumar Muralidharan, in his article ‘NTPC: Power and the Powerless’ gives an overview of the emergence and growth of the NTPC, analysing its obscure beginning as a public sector undertaking in the mid-1970s and its growth to become today by far the most dominant entity in India’s electricity generation landscape. In ‘Adivasi and Women Labour in NTPC, Roma articulates how the tribal community, once owners of rich wealth of natural resources, was ruthlessly uprooted and displaced and identity crushed by converting the tribals into cheap wage labour for the industrial growth of the region. In her article, ‘Assessment of Displacement and NTPC Rehabilitation and Relocation Policy’, Madhu Kohli comprehensively examines the evidently fruitless exercise of rehabilitation offered to villagers displaced by NTPC in the Singrauli region.

On 3 December 2007, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour, chaired by Suravaram Sudhakar Reddy presented its report reviewing the Unorganised Sector Workers Social Security Bill 2007 submitted by the Ministry of Labour and Employment. Included in this issue is the Standing Committee’s proposed version of the legislation on social security for unorganised workers, which was attached as an annexure to the report on the bill.