Homebased Work in 21st Century India

Abstract

Any review study on homebased work in India today must necessarily be located in the context of several advances in understanding developments in homebased work that have taken place across the two decades preceding the adoption of the ILO Convention on Home Work (1996) and the two decades since then. Through this period which spans almost half a century, substantive and wide ranging research has generated a fairly detailed picture of the varied nature and forms of homebased work, and the conditions of piece rated home workers in particular. Considerable progress has been made towards bringing homebased workers ‘out of the shadows’ through mobilization/organization/lobbying at national and international levels. Advances have been made in defining and including them in macro level employment surveys and counting them, as also in documentation of a range of experiences through micro-studies.