Mental Wellbeing of the unorganized sector
Context:
- “Mental health as a universal human right” is this year’s subject for World Mental Health Day, which falls on October 10. The casual worker population is one that is frequently disregarded when discussing mental health.
Mental health of informal workers:
- According to a research conducted by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), 15% of persons in the working age group worldwide suffer from a mental illness. A worker’s mental health can be jeopardised by a variety of factors, including bad and especially harmful working environments, discrimination in the workplace, unemployment, and insecure or precarious employment. On the one hand, respectable work has a favourable impact on mental health.
- Employees who work alone or in low-paying, unsatisfying, or unstable professions are more likely to be exposed to psychosocial dangers, which could jeopardise their mental health.
The experience of India:
- The informal sector employs over 90% of the working population in India. These workers frequently face discrimination, operate in unsafe workplaces, put in long hours, have little access to social or financial protections, experience high levels of uncertainty and deep precarity, and lack regulatory protection—all of which worsen mental health and restrict access to mental health care.
Women’s differences:
- More than 95% of working women in India are employed in low-wage, insecure jobs that are informal and frequently lack social safety. They also endure patriarchal norms and structures in their homes and communities.
Teenage joblessness:
- It is among the highest in India, which has a substantial negative influence on their mental health along with the stigma associated with unemployment. Furthermore, an ILO report shows how, in a state of despair, young employees are turning to more informal and precarious work, taking lower wages and worse working conditions, and perhaps giving up and leaving the workforce entirely.
India’s State of Inequality Report 2022:
- It notes that education actually raises the unemployment rate; this is especially true for educated young women, whose jobless rate is 42%. It is important to consider the quality of employment and long-term social security for the half of India’s population that is of working age during this demographic dividend phase, as they are expected to stay that way for the next 20 years.
Older people:
- In 20 years, India will also have an elderly population, and there is now no social security plan in place for this quickly expanding population, which is particularly susceptible to mental illness.
- According to the 2011 Indian Census, 33 million older persons are still engaged in informal employment after retirement. According to an additional ILO study on senior employment in India, their level of economic dependency and access to financial assets is very low.
The effects of COVID-19:
- According to a survey conducted by Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising (WIEGO) among informal workers in Delhi, the majority of whom are migrants, there is still disparity in the cohorts of informal workers’ recovery from COVID-19. There are still those who report reduced consumption, skipped meals, or food insecurity.
- This year, financing for some programmes has increased, but money for others—like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS)—has decreased.
According to data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 26% of suicide deaths in 2021 involved individuals who worked a regular job. Programmes that guarantee employment can, in fact, enhance mental health results. Social security can therefore be:
- promotional: intended to increase revenue
- preventive: seeking to avert financial hardship
- protective: seeking to provide shielding from shocks from without.
Path ahead: A reconsideration of the 2020 Code on Social Security (CSS):
- It demonstrates the obvious disregard for pressing concerns regarding the social security of India’s informal labour sector. Although social security should be provided to all Indians, this is not stated as a goal in the existing Code.
- Care needs to be drastically improved. Although they contribute significantly to the national revenue, informal workers are always vulnerable to a range of physical, emotional, and economic risks.
- The digital mental health plan has received too much of India’s funding allotment for mental health, which is currently less than 1% of the country’s overall health budget.
- As noted in the World Mental Health Report 2022, improving community-based treatment as well as people-centered, recovery-focused, and human rights-focused care are essential to treating mental health.
In summary:
- Proactive measures are desperately needed to increase mental health awareness and intervention. This is essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 3 on “good health and wellbeing” and SDG 8 on “decent work for all/economic growth,” as well as for defending the fundamental human right to good health, including mental health.
