Downturn in Wages in Rural India

FOCUS

The paper studies the wage trends of casual workers (workers who are engaged in seasonal and intermittent work) in rural areas from 2014-15 to 2022-23. It was published in the Review of Agrarian Studies journal in 2023.

It examines two data sources: Wage Rates in Rural India (WRRI) which is a monthly compiled data on average daily wage rate of agricultural and non-agricultural occupations. It is published by the Ministry of Labour and Employment. The second source is the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) which is administered by the National Statistics Office, and collects data on labour force participation. The central focus of the study is the changes occurring after the covid-19 pandemic. The paper is written by Arindam Das and Yoshifumi Usami.

The paper investigates the growth and deceleration of the real wages, which is the purchasing power of a worker for a day of work, and the causes for such fluctuations. Through this it also examines the discrepancy between the findings shown by WRRI and PLFS.

    FACTOIDS

  1. The paper notes that 2006-07 saw the growth of wage rates due to the implementation of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

  2. Due to droughts in 2014 and 2015, there was a decline in the wage rates for the year 2015-16, the report notes. 

  3. There was a significant impact of covid-19 pandemic due to which wage rates fell faster for female agricultural workers.

  4. For non-agricultural male workers, the wage rates were mostly stagnant. In the last nine years the wage rates for masons only rose from Rs. 251.3 to Rs. 264.7 and for construction workers from Rs 181.2 to Rs. 186.5.

  5. According to the PLFS data, there was a rapid rise in real wages in most of the states between 2020-21 and 2021-22. In most of these states, the male agricultural labourer’s real wages grew more than 10 per cent and for the female agricultural labourer, it grew more than 20 per cent. This signifies an early post pandemic recovery. The WRRI and PLFS contradict each other in the post-pandemic recovery data. 

  6. The PLFS also maintains employment data which showed the post-pandemic shift towards casual labour in the construction industry from 2020-21 to 2022-23 for male agricultural labourers. The shift occurred due to the higher wage rates in the construction industry.

    Focus and Factoids by Shivansh Singh.

AUTHOR

Arindam Das and Yoshifumi Usami

COPYRIGHT

Review of Agrarian Studies, Foundation for Agrarian Studies Bengaluru

PUBLICATION DATE

2023

TAGS

#periodic-labour-force-survey #wage-rates #labour-rights #wages

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