India's unorganised sector: Harsh work conditions and mental health crisis

From manual scavengers to gig workers, poor work culture fuels stress and dissatisfaction across India's workforce

A sewer is the world’s least desired workplace. Yet blocked sewers and septic tanks make up the daily place of work for over 7,00,000 Indians known as manual scavengers, a profession that is officially supposed to be banned in India. A minuscule proportion of such workers get to use the giant cleaning machines that their counterparts in the West can depend on to do their work every day. In the past five years, over 300 Indians, overwhelmingly from among the lowest castes and backward communities, died by drowning or asphyxiation in the line of duty.

Slightly more fortunate than them are the almost 4 million waste pickers for whom a day at the office constitutes picking through a city’s refuse without basic equipment such as gloves and masks that their Western counterparts take for granted to protect them from the fumes of burning garbage and hazardous material, from leaking batteries to discarded syringes and broken glass.

Further up the “value chain” is the smaller cohort of gig workers — cab drivers and delivery boys attached to platforms that command huge valuations from the private equity/venture capital community and on the stock markets. A survey in March revealed that most work more than eight hours a day and about a fifth reported working 12 hours a day. All of them work without benefits. This template is critical to the success of platform owners’ business model. 

Yet in the vast universe of sanitation workers, construction workers, domestic helps and gig workers who get bundled into the 430-odd million category we call the “unorganised sector”, gig workers are considered the lucky ones because they work in conditions that are relatively less physically demanding and dangerous. Despite the sporadic efforts of governments at state and Centre, almost none of these informal workers can rely on basic benefits such as medical help or provident fund. Sophisticated concepts such as work-life balance and mental health counselling are a world away from their universe. 

The point of highlighting these work conditions on World Mental Health Day is that most of the exploitation that Indians witness every day as a matter of course is transmitted upwards, wittingly and unwittingly, into the workplace. So when it comes to toxic culture, the Indian workplace is relentlessly upwardly mobile.

Work hours are considered one aspect of the problem. India counts among those countries with the highest weekly work hours in South Asia at over nine hours a day. According to the International Labour Organisation, more than half of India’s workforce works more than 49 hours a week, or over 10 hours a day, accounting for the world’s second-longest working hours (Bhutan comes first). This figure is likely to disappoint only N R Narayana Murthy who thinks employees must work 70 hours a week to boost productivity. He perhaps misses the point that despite having the world’s second longest average working week, India’s productivity was half that of China’s. Might other work practices play a role in this discrepancy?

Long work hours is just one aspect of work culture. This metric does not figure, for instance, in the Great Places to Work model that has become all the rage in upscale Indian white collar workplaces. Instead companies are judged on fairness, credibility, respect, pride and camaraderie between management, employees and colleagues. Since the study is survey based and the criteria subjective, it is difficult to judge the accuracy of the responses. But it is interesting that the Indian arms of multinationals and companies in the service sector, rather than the mighty family-owned conglomerates, figure among the best places to work.

A reality check to the upbeat PR vocabulary of companies that make the Great Places cut comes from the Gallup 2024 State of the Global Workplace report, which assesses the mental health and well-being of employees worldwide. India takes pride in the fact that it is among the world’s fastest-growing economies. Yet white collar employees do not feel quite so buoyant. A hefty 86 per cent of Indian employees admitted to struggling or suffering; only 14 per cent felt they were thriving. This is significantly lower than the global average of 34 per cent. More worryingly, over a third of Indian employees confessed to feeling daily anger.

The classic employee response to the bad workplace is to either fulfil the minimum requirements or to quit. That’s a choice few workers in the informal sector can exercise and, as good jobs become harder to find, it is a shrinking option in the white-collar world. In fact, research conducted by Society for Human Resource Management suggested that 64 per cent of Indian employees are likely to stay if the organisational culture is good. But bootstrapping the Indian workplace up the ladder of perception would also mean drastically improving work conditions down the work value chain to the lowest sanitation worker too.