As stated earlier the paramount importance of the unorganized sector can be seen in the NSS survey 1999-2000 – around 92% the Indian workforce (around 370 million workers) were employed in the unorganized sector against a standard of 60% in developing countries. NCEUS report in 2004/05 showed an increase in employment in the unorganized sector by 8.6 million, the corresponding figures in organized sector also showed an estimated 8.5 million increase. This meant that by 2005 the 92% workforce of unorganized sector diminished to 86% or 392 million, and according to 2011 NCEUS report the employment in organized sector showed first signs of progress since independence.
So the bottom-line is more and more of the labor are now coming under the purview of the formal enterprises albeit in small steps over the last 5 years, however many experts feel the formalization should have happened a long time ago and the country's inefficient bureaucratic mechanism is the sole reason for procrastination of the inevitable formalization.
This chapter would analyze the Unorganized sector from three perspectives
1. Capital -Role of MFIs in extending credit,
2. Wage disparity based on Gender and
3. Employment/Unemployment numbers in different sectors as well as employment categories.
CAPITAL
Easy access to capital through rural micro-financial institutions has created a boom for self employed workers ,and about 57% males and 62% women of the usually employed come under this category. Despite the increasing financial inclusion of the rural India, low agricultural productivity has resulted in workers who were earlier part of agricultural sector to move out to other sectors- 81% of the male workers were in agriculture in 1977-78 , only 63% in 2004-05.
MFIs
Microfinance has become the central system for extending financial services to unbanked sections of population. Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) in India consists of NGOs