Informal Sector

The Atal Pension Yojana—an old-age pension scheme for informal sector workers—is a major initiative to ensure fixed monthly pension for the elderly. This is guaranteed by the government through the provisioning of assured rates of interest during the accumulation and distribution period. An analysis of the benefit patterns and recommendations to make the scheme more attractive for the informal sector workers is presented.

This paper analyses the findings of a research project undertaken by the School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University on questions of marriage and related issues in the context of paid domestic work among the working women from two squatter colonies in Kolkata. The respondents are seen to be caught between the imperatives of early marriage and girlhood employment, but they insist upon the value of education for their daughters. Many of them have experienced and suffered early marriage and childbirth and are vehement in their rejection of such a trajectory for their daughters, even though not all of them are able to carry through such decisions. Parents from urban working-class neighbourhoods are not obsessed with sexual chastity of their daughters; they accept courtships and elopements, sometimes hailing the latter with some relief. What these mothers share with their middle class counterparts is an interest in tremendous investment in their children's education, which is in both cases accompanied by great expectations for the future.

Street vendors across several Indian cities have generally been regarded as nuisance value, their presence seen as inimical to urban development. However, the range of goods and services they provide renders them useful to other sections of the urban poor and thus they form an important segment of the informal economy. A draft national policy on street vendors argues that needs of this section are vital for urban planning purposes. Regulation of vendors and hawking zones and granting vendors a voice in civic administration need to become definitive elements of urban development policy.

As increasing trends point to businesses and political parties targeting persons rather than masses, forms of patriarchal authority are softened and diffused, leading to a revision of the older distinctions that prevailed between public and private. At the same time, as relations between individuals are mediated more through markets and media, they also generate new kinds of rights and new capacities for imagination along with new ideas of belonging or inclusion that in turn, lead to novel ways of exercising citizenship rights and conceiving politics. This experience of inclusion in new circuits of communication and of sharing intellectual property across classes, such as seen with television, can help to politicise those sections previously marginalised. This paper, examines the implications of this argument in terms of recent debates over the rights of the hawker, or the 'pheriwala', in Mumbai.