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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper focuses attention on the moral value of zimmedari (responsibility) in how cash transfers are understood by informal workers in India. I argue that state responsibility for informal workers is a subject of conflict, but cash transfers are also strategically used to generate solidarities.

Paper Abstract:

Cash transfers are often derided in India across the political spectrum—from the Right, who term them as ‘revdis’ (sweets), and equally by those on the liberal-Left, who argue that they turn citizens into passive ‘labharthis’ (beneficiaries) and distract from structural issues. Equally, recent scholarship on informal work in India emphasises how workers have successfully demanded such benefits from the state, seeking to assert their rights as citizens and voters, and not as employees (Agarwala, 2013). What is less well-examined are the consequences of this shift to the state, and how informal workers themselves understand cash transfers.

In this paper, I draw on fourteen months of participant observation in an informal workers’ union and clinic in Rajasthan, India. I describe contestations around a State policy that pays a cash transfer to workers diagnosed with silicosis, a lung disease caused by hazardous working conditions. Specifically, I interrogate how the moral value of zimmedari (responsibility) is mobilised within the union and among civil society activists. Importantly, the question of assigning monetary responsibility for workplace disease to the State is a subject of conflict among union members and activists, who recognise the value of benefits in providing relief but worry that cash transfers do little to regulate employers who continue to extract surplus value from exploitative working conditions. Far from being passive recipients, I show that the silicosis cash transfers are engaged with in a variety of ways to generate solidarity and bolster attempts to hold the state and employers accountable.