Write short note: Sociological perspectives of “Right to work” in India. (1990)
The right to work sits in Article 41, among the Directive Principles, read with Article 39(a) on adequate means of livelihood and Article 43 on a living wage. It is not justiciable, though the Supreme Court has drawn livelihood into the right to life under Article 21. Sociologically what matters is what work does in a society where work was assigned by birth.
Why work is a sociological question
- Émile Durkheim, in The Division of Labour in Society (1893), made occupational specialisation the source of social integration, so exclusion from work is a form of anomie, not merely a loss of income.
- Karl Marx located human self-realisation in labour; unemployment and degraded labour are both conditions of alienation.
- Max Weber‘s class–status–party distinction reminds us that an occupation is at once an income and a rank.
The Indian specificity
Caste made work hereditary and unchosen. B. R. Ambedkar‘s objection in Annihilation of Caste (1936) was that caste is not a division of labour but a division of labourers, graded and fixed at birth — so a right to work in India implies a right to choose work. Add three structural facts: an overwhelmingly informal workforce, joblessness appearing as underemployment rather than open unemployment, and the concentration of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe workers in casual and stigmatised work.
The statutory embodiment
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 turned the directive principle into an entitlement: a hundred days of unskilled manual work per rural household, work within fifteen days or an unemployment allowance, and a statutory wage pitched low enough to be self-selecting. It mattered for three sociological reasons — it created a rural wage floor; it gave Dalit and women workers, a large share of participants, an exit from dependence on the dominant landholder; and it made work a claim on the state rather than a favour from a patron. Against that: delayed wages, allocations lagging demand, and rationing of work at the block level.
The guarantee has now been recast. The Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, passed in December 2025 and in force across India from 1 July 2026, raises the entitlement to 125 days but permits states to suspend works for up to sixty days in peak agricultural seasons — precisely when the guarantee’s bargaining effect on rural wages was strongest.
Conclusion
Read sociologically, the right to work is a status claim: livelihood is owed by the political community, not allotted by caste or patron. Its worth depends on whether the guarantee is there when the worker’s alternative is weakest.