Abstract

There has been an upsurge of interest on urban informal sector in India in recent years. A number of studies have been commissioned, books and articles published, and seminars and workshops conducted focussing both on its theoretical as well as operational aspects. The substantial increase in the volume of person days of employment, percentage of subsidiary and casual workers in the early nineties, after the formal launching of the programmes of structural adjustment, has given a boost to informal sector studies since much of this incremental employment has been generated within this sector. There has, however, been a hiatus between conceptualization of the informal sector in theory and its practical application in empirical research. Theoretical research on the development dynamics in India as also in other developing countries has stipulated several characteristics of the informal sector in terms of technology, production relations, conditions of work and workers, among others. It also envisages certain types of relationship between the formal and informal sector. Unfortunately, empirical studies analysing the pattern of growth of the informal sector at the national or state level have generally used a single criterion such as the number of workers, capital employed, use of electricity or registration with certain public agencies as the basis for identification of the informal sector This is mainly due to limited availability of data from secondary sources and problems of temporal comparability therein

Description