Working people in the Indian economy: a structural analysis

Drawing on reliable secondary sources, this paper presents a differentiated profile of the Indian working people. This exercise needs to be done as it makes us realize that a differentiated vulnerability assessment of different sections of the working class leads to the need for a differentiated strategizing for decent livelihoods creation for different groups of workers. Successive governments in post-independent India have failed to do so, and instead they have not only shown an undifferentiated casual approach to the vast majority of unprotected or unorganised workers but also a systematic tendency to make wrong policy choices only to worsen the vulnerability traps of the varieties of working people. Thus the Indian state has been a de facto exclusionary, predatory state while de jure pretending to be an inclusionary social state.