Offrir une protection sociale aux travailleurs informels : leçons tirées des mesures d'assistance dans la crise de la COVID-19 en Inde [Translation: Offering social protection to informal workers : lessons learned from assistance measures in India during the COVID-19 crisis]

Over 80% of Indian workers participate in the informal economy, which means they are subject to income precariousness, have atypical employment contracts and enjoy limited labor rights. The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown it has engendered across India have wiped out their livelihoods. The Indian government has responded by developing a wide range of large-scale assistance in the form of food, accommodation, salaries and repatriation. But the very nature of the work done by informal workers makes it difficult to effectively grant these rights. Faced with this challenge, Dr Gautam Bhan, recipient of an AXA Fund Award for Research at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, seeks with his team to assess, model and document state and non-state relief initiatives related to Covid-19 in four areas - housing, food security, income and wage transfers, and health systems, for all informal workers in urban areas of India. They seek both to explain how current assistance measures for informal workers can be scaled up and continued in recovery cycles, and to assess how they can be part of an expanded social safety net after the crisis that will protect workers in the next inevitable crisis, whether epidemiological, economic or environmental.