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Paper short abstract:

My research aims to study the impacts of an unconditional basic income and community organising pilot in South India. I explore its impacts on poverty and unfree labour, and potential implications for social policy.

Paper long abstract:

As the debate on basic income as the future of social protection and policy continues to gain ground, including in the global south, its effects on specific aspects of poverty and political economy is important to explore. Scholars and advocates of UBI have long argued that giving an economic floor to all can enhance people's 'power to say no' to exploitative relationships. This is particularly significant in situations of unfree and indecent labour, current efforts to combatting which can be classified into two broad categories. One, stopping/abolishing work deemed indecent/exploitative, disregarding the agency of those involved; two, tokenistic efforts that do not address the reasons that push workers into this condition in the first place. Both do little to prioritise or enhance workers' subjective and material agency and dignity. Critical to the ‘Decent Work Agenda’ and the architecture of welfare regimes historically, is empowering people with a greater sense of freedom and dignity, as well as the capacity to fight against or 'exit' indecent work. Two broad gaps emerge. One, there is no emic conceptualisation of 'dignity' and 'freedom' rooted in the voices and relationships of those policy aims to target. Two, UBI's emancipatory claims on poverty and exploitative labour have been subject to limited empirical scrutiny. I am conducting an ethnographic study of a UBI pilot in five slum communities in urban India, to create a more people-centred conceptualisation of freedom and dignity and put to scrutiny the emancipatory claims of a basic income with regards to indecent labour.