India's Changing Cityscapes: Work, Migration and Livelihoods
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Supriya RoyChowdhury Carol Upadhya INDIA’S CHANGING CITYSCAPES: WORK, MIGRATION AND LIVELIHOODS INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL AND NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC CHANGE ADVANCED STUDIES Bengaluru, India Bengaluru, India Project Report NIAS/SSc/UMS/U/RR/01/2020 CPIGD 55 India’s Changing Cityscapes: Work, Migration and Livelihoods ISEC - NIAS Collaborative Research Programme, funded by Indian Council of Social Science Research Co-directors: Supriya RoyChowdhury (Institute for Social and Economic Change) Carol Upadhya (National Institute of Advanced Studies) Research team: Prajwal Nagesh (Research Associate) Vishaka Warrier (Research Associate) Harpreet Kaur (Research Associate) Pragati Tiwari (Research Associate) Sazana Jayadeva (Postdoctoral Associate, former) INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL AND NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC CHANGE ADVANCED STUDIES Bengaluru, India Bengaluru, India Copyright ISEC and NIAS, 2020 Published by Institute for Social and Economic Change Dr. V K R V Rao Road Nagarabhavi Post Bangalore – 560 072 Tel: (080) 2321 5468 Fax: 23217008 E-mail: [email protected] National Institute of Advanced Studies Indian Institute of Science Campus Bengaluru - 560 012 Tel: 2218 5000, Fax: 2218 5028 E-mail: [email protected] NIAS Report: NIAS/SSc/UMS/U/RR/01/2020 ISEC Report: CPIGD 55 Cover photo: From authors’ fieldwork in Bangalore Executive Summary India’s economic liberalization programme produced high rates of economic growth, yet the structural transformation of the Indian economy has been relatively slow. Although the share of agriculture in GDP has steadily declined, the largest number of workers in India are still employed in agriculture and other rural occupations. The reasons for this situation are complex, but one aspect of the problem is the restructuring of the urban economy in which manufacturing has been overtaken by services. While the dominant development discourse equates economic development with urbanization and industrialization, the economic trajectory of Indian cities challenges this model. India’s cities have witnessed the expansion of the ‘new service economy’ – most notably high- skilled industries such as software outsourcing but also low-skilled sectors such as hospitality, big retail, security services and transportation. As this consumption-oriented economy expands – through the proliferation of shopping malls, exclusive hotels and restaurants, spas and beauty parlours, and fleets of cars and taxis serving middle-class urban commuters – new employment opportunities have been created for people with a range of educational levels and skills. Despite their diversity, these new jobs have certain features in common – precarity, instability and informal employment conditions – although they are located in ‘formal sector’ organizations. The labour market for these new forms of service work is increasingly organized through private employment and training agencies, which have professionalized the recruitment and training of service workers. It is within this larger context of ‘jobless growth’ that the crisis of unemployment – and especially of educated unemployment – has become a major area of concern and policy initiatives, in particular the ‘Skill India’ policy. Skill India, as policy and discourse, has attempted to bridge the gap between two the domains of joblessness and lack of skills by promoting short-term skill training programmes imparted mainly by private partners, marking an important shift from the earlier pattern of vocational education. The multiplication of policies and programmes at the central and state levels have generated a new set of institutions, agencies and processes, aimed particularly at underprivileged youth. This ‘ecosystem’ of institutions – skill commissions, industry-led Sector Skill Councils, diverse funding programmes and skilling frameworks – promotes skill training through a large number of private institutions, run mainly by private companies and NGOs drawing on corporate as well as government funding. This policy approach has created a difficult set of problems and contradictions, which are highlighted by our study. The increasing importance of services, combined with the crisis in agriculture in many regions, rural unemployment, and rising levels of education as well as aspirations, have engendered new pathways and modalities of mobility, as potential workers flow into the city from rural areas and small i towns in search of jobs. However, several economists have questioned whether the service sector can provide sufficient employment for India’s youth, given that the growth of employment in services has not kept pace with its share in GDP. This study, by mapping the intersections between migration, skilling and changing patterns of employment in cities, is located within these debates on development and employment in post-liberalization India. The research presented in this report has explored how the changing urban economic and occupational structure has reshaped patterns of migration, work, livelihoods, aspirations and the possibilities of economic and social mobility. Based on extensive field research in Bangalore and Raichur district, Karnataka, we argue that training centres are playing a significant role in the production of this new workforce. We find that their mandate is not only to contribute to the national effort to make youth ‘employable’, but also to produce workers who are fit for the evolving urban service economy – a space that is defined as ‘formal sector’ (in the sense of organized or corporatized services) yet is marked by informalization of work and employment conditions. Within this large domain, our study focused particularly on the beauty & wellness, bit retail and transportation sectors. Insofar as a central thrust of many skill training programmes is to incorporate rural youth into urban employment as a means of poverty alleviation, rural-urban migration is central to the ideas of progress and social mobility that are embedded in the new skills script. But this study demonstrates that the migration process is much more complex than what many actors in the skill universe imagine: the fragility of life and livelihood within the framework of informal work defines the parameters within which youth may aspire to move to cities and seek urban jobs, but often they are compelled to turn back due to the paucity of decent and well-paid work as well as high cost of sustaining themselves in the city on the salaries that are available. Moreover, we found that while training institutions play a significant role in shaping the aspirations of educated rural youth for migration, mentoring or hand-holding mechanisms that could facilitate their transition into the urban service workforce are ill-designed and often dysfunctional. The study suggests that skill training has to a large extent become a numbers game, wherein training centres are required to produce the requisite quantum of graduates and placements to meet the requirements of their funders (government agencies or corporate social responsibility initiatives). However, there is little effort on the part of sponsors, the state or the institutions themselves to determine the effectiveness of the training in producing sustainable employment, to follow the trajectory of vulnerable trainees once they are released into the urban services job market, or more broadly to understand the impact of skill training on the lives of these youth. This disconnect between the aims of skill training programmes and the reality of youth aspirations and the urban job market revealed itself in different ways. In Raichur, for example, several training centres were engaged in ii imparting skills like tailoring and sales management in a place where there are no garment factories in which tailors could be employed and no malls offering retail jobs. This shows that a local employment market analysis, which should be a prerequisite for designing skill training programmes, had not been undertaken. In Bangalore, we found that most of the graduates of the training programmes we studied had left the jobs where they had been placed within a few weeks or months, suggesting that skill training did not actually lead to stable urban employment. Training, however valuable, did not prepare the trainees for the realities of the urban lower- end services job market – labour surplus, unregulated and insecure work, and near-absence of labour rights or possibility of collective action. The precarity and informality of work in this domain generates multiple vulnerabilities for workers in the sectors that we studied. Low wages and uncertain tenure create a context where workers are encouraged to move quickly from one job to another, and one place to another, in search of a pay hike of even a few hundred rupees or less onerous working conditions. Often, when they become disappointed with the available opportunities or find it difficult to save money to send home (the main purpose of migrating for work in the first place), they return to their hometowns or villages where they may take up odd jobs, go back to always available construction work, resume their education, or just remain idle. Finally, the study indicates that the Skill India policy itself is not sufficiently anchored in the reality of India’s political economy. The preponderance of informal employment within the ‘organized’ service economy makes the future of the skilled and semi-educated service sector employee almost as bleak as that of the unskilled construction or informal economy worker.