Lockdown to fight corona virus is going to hit most Indian workers very hard

[Informalisation and Labour Rights - Related News]

With at least 250 million Indians going into lockdown from Monday morning, one question looms large - what will precariously placed workers do? The share of those in India with precarious jobs is far higher than is commonly believed to be the case. According to the most recent labour statistics, 25 percent of rural households and 12 percent of urban households rely on casual labour as their main source of income. Casual labour was defined as a person who was engaged not in a fixed, but in a casual manner in another person's enterprise and, in return, was paid daily or periodically.