With an unprecedented decline in manufacturing employment, driven by the informal manufacturing sector in India, the article examines the concurrent enterprise-level structural shifts in the IMS during 2011–16 using unit-level data from the National Sample Survey enterprises survey.
The authors thank Limakumba Walling, Abhishek Shaw, and the anonymous reviewers from EPW for providing valuable comments on earlier drafts.
The Indian manufacturing sector experienced significant transformations in employment structures during the 2010s, marked by a decline in the workforce of the informal manufacturing sector (IMS) in the first half of the decade while recovering partially in the latter half (Mehrotra and Parida 2019; NSSO 2023). On the other hand, formal manufacturing continued to exhibit negligible employment growth throughout the period. Paradoxically, in the early 2010s, although the labour input at the sectoral level decreased, the number of IMS enterprises employing them grew by 16%, indicating a parallel shift in enterprise-level structures within the IMS (NSSO 2012, 2017). This article aims to explore these structural compositional changes at the enterprise level using unit-level data from the 67th (2010–11) and 73rd (2015–16) rounds of the Unincorporated Non-Agricultural Enterprises (excluding Construction) Survey.
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