As result of “worst global crisis since World War II”, approximately 400 million Indians employed in the informal sector are at risk of slipping deeper into poverty, says the reports of International Labour Organisation (ILO).
Globally the coronavirus pandemic will likely impact 195 million full-time jobs or about 6.7 percent of working hours in the second quarter of 2020.
A report published by the United Nations labour body, detailing how COVID-19 will affect the world, revealed that the crisis is already impacting tens of millions of informal sector workers and will further put around 2 billion people at risk. This trend will be mostly seen in developing economies, it said.
“In India, with a share of almost 90 per cent of people working in the informal economy, about 400 million workers are at risk of falling deeper into poverty during the crisis. Current lockdown measures in India, which are at the high end of the University of Oxford’s COVID-19 Government Response Stringency Index, have impacted these workers significantly, forcing many of them to return to rural areas,” the report said emphasising the substantial impact of lockdown and other containment measures on the informal economies of developing nations.
Globally 1.25 billion informal workers are at high risk of “drastic and devastating” increase in dismissals along with reduction in wages and working hours. Many such workers are in low-skilled and low-paying jobs in which sudden loss of incomes can have profound consequences.
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