A recent government report said “seventy-seven percent of Indians, about 836 million people, live on less than half a dollar a day. India is considered as one of the hottest economies of the world but now it seems, it needs to do something about the enormous inequalities.
The report entitled “Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganized Sector” by the state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS) said, most of those living on below 50 US cents per day were from the informal labor sector with no job or social security, living in abject poverty. For most of them, conditions of work are utterly deplorable and livelihood options extremely few.
According to the report, based on data from 2004-2005, 92 percent of India’s total workforce of 457 million were employed as agricultural laborers and farmers, or in jobs such as working in quarries, brick kilns or as street vendors. The report said, “such a sordid picture co-exists uneasily with a shining India that has successfully confronted the challenge of globalization powered by economic competition both within the country and across the world.”
Around 26 percent of India’s population lives below the poverty line. Economic liberalization since the early 1990s has created a 300 million-strong middle class and led to an average annual economic growth of 8.6 percent over the last four years, but millions of the country’s poor remain untouched by the boom. The report said the majority of those working and living under “miserable conditions” were lower castes, tribal people and Muslims and the most disadvantaged of these were women, migrant workers and children.
