Urban safety net

Govt needs new ideas to address distress in cities

Recent data prints from both the private and public sector have revealed that there is considerable distress within India’s labour force. This distress has manifested in an increase in the agricultural workforce in the Periodic Labour Force Survey over the previous round in 2017-18 for the first time in the National Sample Survey’s history. This fits with anecdotal evidence of the precarious urban poor leaving in distress due to various blows to the urban sector compounded by the pandemic. It is in this context that a recent recommendation from the Parliamentary Standing Committee on labour, in a report submitted to Parliament, needs to be viewed. The committee has argued that “the plight of urban poor has not received much attention from the government”, and that therefore “there is an imperative need for putting in place an employment guarantee programme for the urban workforce in line with [the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme]”. This call for an “urban MGNREGA” is not new, but this is the first time it has received such a backing. In fact, the Union government studied the possibility when the pandemic first hit last year, and even had meetings with the relevant state-level bureaucrats to elicit opinion. It was, according to various reports, subsequently judged to be both an unmanageable fiscal burden and to present severe implementation difficulties across regions.
 

It is true that there are substantive differences in the pattern of work and distress across rural and urban areas of India that make designing a carbon copy of the MGNREGA for use in urban areas difficult. For example, rural employment can often be seasonal. This means that there is scope for a 100-day supplement of seasonal wages in periods when there is no seed to be sown or harvest to be taken in. Urban employment does not always exhibit this feature. It is also true that many of those who are in distress due to the pandemic in urban areas may be in work that does not involve manual labour — unlike, say, casual agricultural workers, the primary target of MGNREGA— and thus the work in an urban job guarantee scheme may not find as many takers. 

Even so, the basic point that there is a big hole in how welfare programmes are designed in India is a valid one. Too many of them are connected to specific locations, and in particular “home” villages. This leads to migrants to cities and towns experiencing an unusual precariousness of existence. The demand for “one nation, one ration card” during the pandemic revealed the need to design welfare systems that are transferable and mobile. There are, in addition, other source of precarity that need to be addressed, including the shortage of affordable housing. If daily wage earners need constant work in order to not be rendered homeless, then they will of course not be able to stay in towns and cities through crises of any sort, whether those crises are personal in nature or broader such as a pandemic. Some states have already started experimenting with urban wage support programmes. These should be examined for lessons, and new pilot programmes should be started to evaluate how an urban safety net can be designed and implemented. Finally, of course, like the MGNREGA itself, an urban safety net cannot be a permanent solution. Structural solutions like up-skilling and lifelong learning need to be put in place to end precarity once and for all.