Livelihood Opportunity to Urban Poor through Guaranteed Employment Schemes during COVID-19 Pandemic in India: A Study of Himachal and Jharkhand

Economic shutdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic have had negative impacts on urban economy in general and on the livelihood of urban poor in particular. Informal workers represent 61% of all workers globally - a total of 2 billion workers worldwide. Of these, an estimated 1.6 billion which is 80% could see their livelihoods destroyed due to the lockdowns and related shelter-at-home restrictions in response to COVID-19. City dwellers particularly the poor informal sector workers have taken the maximum brunt of the pandemic. Lockdowns, social distancing norms, shutting down of markets, factories and allied activities have paralyzed the work opportunities for these sections of urban populations. Urban unemployment which was in stress, got sharpened further during the initial weeks of the pandemic. During the pandemic many states like Orissa, Jharkhand, Kerala and Himachal Pradesh took proactive action apart from the union government to minimise the distresses of the urban poor by introducing urban employment guarantee schemes in different names. The present paper is an effort to study the experiences of two states i.e., Himachal Pradesh and Jharkhand on the basis of secondary data collected from the departments of urban development.