‘Social security protection now covers 48% of Indians’: ILO
New estimates by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) put India’s total social-security coverage at 48.8%, compared to 24% earlier.
New estimates by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) put India’s total social-security coverage at 48.8%, compared to 24% earlier, a revision based on updated data provided by the Union government about welfare schemes for workers in the formal sector, including their families, Union labour minister Mansukh Mandaviya said on Tuesday.
The labour ministry had carried out a “data-pooling exercise” in collaboration with the UN agency for a comprehensive assessment of all social schemes available to organised-sector workers, many of which were not being captured in international evaluations since they are scattered and some are implemented by states, the minister said.
The ILO primarily considers insurance, healthcare facilities, pensions, maternity, disability and unemployment benefits financed either through contribution from wages or public investment as social-protection measures.
“We are of the view that 48.8% is still an underestimation. In-kind benefits, such as free food to 80 crore (800 million) people, are not counted as social protection. However, there are UN benchmarks that consider in-kind benefits such as food and housing as social assistance,” the labour minister said, adding: “We will seek inclusion of in-kind benefits provided by the Centre as well as states in measuring the total social-security coverage.”
“For the first time, new trend data indicates that more than half of the world’s population are covered by social protection,” an ILO report on social security said.
On India, the ILO update states that “48.8% of Indians are covered under some form of social protection programmes”.
Last week, Union labour secretary Sumita Dawra and ILO officials discussed the issue in Geneva, where ILO is headquartered, in which the agency said that housing and food security fall under a set of extended indicators and it could consider recognising these benefits as social protection.
The data-pooling exercise showed that 65% of India’s population (about 920 million people) is covered by at least one social-protection benefit (both in-cash and in-kind), according to the minister. Of this, 48.8% receive cash benefits under social-assistance schemes, the minister said.
The government felt that given the large number of welfare schemes for both formal-sector and informal-sector workers, the ILO estimates of 24% coverage were low and didn’t reflect the full extent of social protection, an official said.
To be sure, employment in Asia’s third-largest economy is overwhelmingly informal, with over 80% of working Indians lacking formal contracts, paid leave or social security. The informal sector consists of enterprises which are own-account enterprises, typically small businesses owned by proprietors or partnerships.
For a revision in the estimates of social-security coverage, the labour ministry carried out an exercise to estimate the coverage of welfare schemes through Aadhaar-linked identifiers for 34 major central schemes, such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employee Guarantee Scheme, the coverage of the Employee Provident Fund Organisation, Employees State Insurance Scheme, and the nutrition programme, PM-POSHAN. “Nearly 2 billion records were processed to identify unique beneficiaries,” the official said.
However, according to ILO, Indian workers are among the most vulnerable to the impacts from climate change, which could increase unemployment and poverty.
“But this welcome progress (of global increase in social security) is dampened by the fact that 3.8 billion people are still entirely unprotected from life’s challenges and the impacts of climate change,” the agency said.
