Podcast: Coping with ‘notebandi’: Voices of informal workers

Mukta Naik on January 2nd, 2017

Life has been hard following demonetisation, especially so for informal workers who constitute as per the NCEUS’ 2007 report, about 92% of India’s workforce. In Delhi, many of these informal workers are also migrants. But behind the stories of hardship, there is the reality of coping mechanisms and a variety of strategies that have helped people survive and manage risks.

In the first two weeks of December researchers from the Centre for Policy Research, a SHRAMIC partners, carried out intensive field work over two weeks with the idea of documenting the reality on the ground, setting aside the sharp and politicized debates in the media. They interviewed workers across categories of informal work in Delhi, such as construction workers, sabjiwalas, dhaba workers, small shopkeepers, industrial contract workers etc., and also interacted with Tata Trust’s NGO partners in Uttar Pradesh to understand how they have coped with the impact of demonetisation or ‘notebandi’, as it is commonly called.

In the seventh episode (above) of CPR’s podcast, ThoughtSpace, Richa Bansal talks to Senior Researchers Mukta Naik and Ashwin Parulkar and Research Associates Eesha Kunduri and Manish to unpack their findings on informal workers’ strategies of coping with ‘notebandi’.

Click here to listen: Coping with Notebandi: Voices of informal workers