Contribution:

I highlight the specific disenfranchisement of unorganised sector workers from full citizenship despite the constitutional guarantee of equality. I show that the lack of accountability in fiscal and administrative practices negatively impact the citizenship experience of workers in India.

Why would you like to speak in this workshop?:

I would like to bring to attention, some key issues around the deployment of the Building and Construction Workers (BOCW) welfare funds for pandemic relief in India.

Pre-pandemic, funds running into billions of Indian rupees lay unspent with special-purpose social welfare boards such as the BOCW welfare boards in India. The BOCW boards are Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) meant to address the specific vulnerabilities of building and construction workers through the BOCW Act 1996.

Right after the COVID-19-induced lockdown in India in March 2020, the central government instructed the states to mobilise the BOCW funds for pandemic relief. A few states also used BOCW funds for vaccination drives. In addition to emergency cash and food distribution, several states used these funds for vaccination of the beneficiaries. Approximately ₹310 billion of the ₹1.7 trillion mobilised towards pandemic relief were reallocated from the BOCW boards. In doing so, the state appears benevolent, providing vaccinations to not just registered, but also unregistered construction workers and their families. However, a closer look clarifies that falling back on the unspent funds lying with the BOCW boards effectively translates to the vulnerable workers subsidising the state’s public health expenditure.

Through interviews with registered workers and activists, bureaucrats and administrators working with the BOCW boards in India, I examine the working of the BOCW boards in select Indian states. I argue that the specific vulnerabilities of unorganised sector workers, specifically the migrant building and construction workers relegate them to second-class citizenship.

Contribution:

My paper will argue that the construction workers must systematically perform that they are genuine (asli) workers by deploying a wide variety of cultural tactics to prove their authenticity and claim their welfare entitlements from the labor boards.

Why would you like to speak in this workshop?:

In 1996, the "Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Services) Act" was enacted. The Act paved the way for the establishment of the Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Boards across India, which intended to provide welfare benefits and regulate the working conditions of the construction workers primarily working in the unorganized or informal sectors of the economy. However, much of the funds collected (as mandatory cess) by the Boards remains unspent for several reasons. Establishing eligibility, registering with the Board, and meeting timelines to receive funds remain critical issues in availing these welfare benefits on the part of the workers. Drawing on ethnographic research at one of the labor welfare board offices—the Pushp Vihar office in South Delhi —this paper will examine the everyday politics of negotiations required to register oneself as a worker and to obtain the eligible entitlements. The paper will provide insight into the complex worlds of entrepreneurial unions (which demand a percentage of commission to support the workers in their pursuits), construction sector contractors and employers, Board office members, and a variety of brokers and intermediaries. Through this insight, the paper will ask the following key questions: how is verification carried out and eligibility established? How are mistakes redressed in the labor cards? How are claims authenticated? I will argue that the workers must systematically perform that they are genuine (asli) workers by deploying a wide variety of cultural tactics to prove their authenticity and claim their entitlements.

Contribution:

This presentation looks at the struggle on realising the potential of a specific welfare fund meant for construction workers in India. It looks at a welfare cess introduced in August 1996 and unpacks why a substantial part of that fund remains unspent and what happened during Covid19 pandemic.

Why would you like to speak in this workshop?:

I have been researching the phenomenon of unspent funds and the efforts of workers' organisation to seek accountability from below. I would like to speak about what the performance audit on the functioning of the fund management authority, namely state and UT level Building and Other Construction Workers' Welfare Boards have found, how have those audit findings been responded to by the audited entity and what course correction, if any, was attempted.

I would also like to present how the unspent accumulated balance lying in this special purpose fund was mobilised since March 2020, when the India's Ministry of Labour and Employment issued an advisory to state governments to tap into this fund to disburse to construction workers emergency cash assistance during the pandemic through Direct Benefit Transfer mode.

I would also present how the state governments tapped into this fund to meet all sorts of emergency pandemic expenditure, be it the efforts to mobilise food assistance to construction workers (which ideally should have got financed by enhanced budgetary allocations to Food and Civil Supplies Dept) in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, or the efforts to carry out special vaccination drives for construction workers in Punjab, Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu etc.

Thus, my overall thrust would be to explicate how fiscal bureaucracy looks at this non-lapsable special purpose fund, as if it was a low hanging fruit and was an untied all weather fund. In short, the mobilisation of this fund resulted in India's Finance Minister not face huge fiscal deficit.

Contribution:

I would like to discuss mechanisms and actions to increase democratic accountability towards the allocation and use of social welfare funds.

Why would you like to speak in this workshop?:

The response to Covid-19 has entailed the largest peacetime expansion in fiscal deficits in history, requiring new financial instruments, a repurposing of existing ones, and a search for liquidity in general. This contribution seeks to explore the use of specific social welfare funds in two different developmental contexts – India and Italy – characterized by fragmented and multilevel governance. It will address questions such as: why are there unspent social purpose funds in the first place? How can they be identified in contexts of institutional – and in particular accounting – fragmentation? Which initiatives have been taken to remedy the situation, in particular in the context of the massive spendings that occurred the Covid-19 pandemic? The paper builds on the data collected in two different socioeconomic and institutional settings, which present however valuable points of comparisons in terms of their decentralised policy and political framework. In both instances, unspent funds provide a valuable vantage point to analyse institutional architectures of accountability.