Crushed by downturn, Indians find little government help

The day that Kusum lost her job working on the assembly line at an electronics factory, she told her five children the new status quo: She would buy milk and chapatti, or flatbread, only every second day. And when the school term ends, they will not be continuing. She cannot afford the $3 fee the public school asks for each of them.
For the past six years, 40-year-old Kusum -- who, like many in her community, uses only one name -- has fitted small covers on to circuit breakers at a Havells India Ltd. factory, 8 1/2 hours a day, six days a week. She earned $77 a month.
But one day in mid-January, she was given a month's salary and told not to come back.
The plant has laid off 400 contract workers, and 215 permanent staff, since the start of the year, citing a decline in demand because of the global economic crisis.
For weeks, she has been trolling the industrial area but, like her former co-workers, she finds no sign of new jobs.
And like the vast majority of India's work force, she qualifies for neither unemployment benefits nor welfare programs.
"Without a job, there is no survival," she says.
At least 500,000 Indians have lost their jobs since the global recession began to be felt here in October, and both the export manufacturing and the cherished information technology sectors have seen sharp contractions.
Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said last week that another 1.5 million jobs will be lost over the next six months.
Despite the evidence of growing large-scale layoffs, and the lack of a safety net, the response of the Indian government to date has been muted.
As economic growth has slowed -- the projected rate was scaled back recently to 5.3 percent for 2009 from last year's forecast of 9 percent -- the central government has passed two stimulus packages. But the measures were largely designed to stimulate demand, through steps such as cutting gasoline prices and taxes on consumer durables.
"The central government stimulus contained nothing for job creation," said Praveen Jha, who teaches at the Center for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. "They are total market fundamentalists, and they think using the market is enough."
And the rising job loss numbers mask a starker truth about work in India: The vast majority of those counted as employed are grossly underemployed or in survival jobs -- sweeping streets, selling oranges from a stall or doing day construction labor, earning a subsistence wage. Any loss of earning opportunity pushes them, and the large network of people they typically support, into a situation as perilous as Kusum's.
For the working urban poor, people like Kusum, there is nothing. India's largest social security initiative is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which promises 100 days of work to the adults of each household that wants it. But at best, this provides cash for food. It does nothing to mitigate the loss of remittances from relatives working abroad, or to advance skills or create new markets.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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