Learning Outcomes:
- What is the PMMVY Scheme?
- Why do women in the unorganised sector struggle to fit within the maternity benefit
policies - How do such policies keep the social reproduction of labour intact?
- Why are lower-caste women stuck in situations of permanent servility within
oppressive caste-based job profiles - What makes the public-private divide utopian for pregnant/lactating women in the
unorganised sector
Earlier this week, I was waiting for my Uber driver outside my apartment in West Delhi when I saw a house help carry the waste from one of the nearby apartments to the garbage truck. I couldn’t help but notice she was pregnant, and from what it seemed, she was due soon. What struck me was how women in the informal sector are often at a loss for choices that govern their health benefits. India is in its 75th year of Independence, and even today, most women who contribute to the country’s workforce are not covered under the ambits of maternity policies.
What is the PMMVY Scheme and How Inclusive Is It?
Post-independence, policymaking till the 1970s viewed women as “vulnerable” and consigned them to social welfare programs, failing to understand the unpaid and paid work that women do, which interlock with their maternal roles.
However, social welfare benefits have brought maternity benefits that only apply to the organised sector, comprising a small fraction of the workforce. Therefore, the social contribution and labour of a large proportion of women from Dalits and other lower castes, which make up a huge portion of the informal sector, get invisibility with such benefits into play. The lack of maternity welfare schemes limits their horizons to their ‘primary responsibility’ of mothering and often interferes with the public labour they perform.
The article critically analyses the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana, a scheme that came into effect on 1st January 2017, wherein lactating women and pregnant women receive a cash benefit of INR 5000 in 3 instalments directly into their bank account on meeting certain conditions. Regarded as the most prominent scheme for maternity welfare in the informal sector, it was implemented by the Ministry of Women and Child Development and run by the Indian Government and specifies its target beneficiaries as All eligible Pregnant Women and Lactating Mothers who are not part of companies that provide similar benefits and are pregnant with their first child. The analytical focus regarding this scheme is twofold: first, how women from the lower castes struggle to fit into this scheme given its certain limitations and how the scheme, in return, structures them (by weaving its features to keep the process of social reproduction intact), and second, how the structuring further leads to a blurred division between the public-private labour that these women perform.
A probable reason women struggle to fit into this scheme might be inferred from the specifics preceding shared. For beneficiaries to avail of this scheme, even contract workers, they must be shown on the employer’s books to be eligible. With higher illiteracy rates, this seems farfetched and constitutes one of the main reasons. Also, most women working in unorganised sectors are on daily wages, are not employed long-term, or are workers without an identifiable employer or designated employment site. Above all these limitations, the features of this scheme do not align with the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines of the six-month period of exclusive breastfeeding that infants should receive to reduce infant mortality due to diarrhoeal diseases resulting from bottle-feeding. Women often make the difficult choice of introducing formula feed to their babies or quitting work, often the former decision resulting in high infant mortality rates during the first birth.
Therefore, with higher fertility and high infant mortality rates `almost 56% of women, specifically from lower caste communities, will be ineligible if the exclusionary criteria as per the scheme are followed since the scheme specifies that once the child dies, the later instalments would be paid to the woman during her next pregnancy.
The Invisible Forces to Maintain Social Reproduction of Labour
It’s noteworthy to consider a certain fragment of the data published in 2018 by the National Family
Health Survey: The section with the lowest income had the highest number of children at 3.2, and the richest had the least at 1.5. The fertility rate of the lower castes was also the highest compared to that of the upper castes, with Scheduled Tribes at 2.5, Scheduled Castes at 2.3, and Other Backward Castes at 2.2.
Despite having an inherent knowledge regarding an increased fertility rate among women from marginalised communities, the government-run scheme has mandated that any woman from the unorganised sector would receive the benefits for her first child only where the maintenance of social reproduction by such schemes becomes operational.
Inspired by the works of Meena Gopal in this area, I shall try to incur that the PMMVY scheme uses the marginalised communities’ dispossession that they experience with land and labour to structure its beneficiaries and keep them intact within labour processes that harbour their social identities.
Considering feminist Sociologist Lise Vogel’s work in this domain and situating the same in the Indian context, caste-based societies that rely on biological procreation to reproduce labour power encounter several contradictions. The brief period for which pregnant women experience a reduced ability to work creates anxieties within the upper castes because the latter feel that they are missing out on surplus labour. But at the same time, they are at peace knowing that the workforce gets replenished with the lower caste women’s childbearing, thereby benefiting them. Therefore, although according to the state’s notion that women from the unorganised sector are more likely to contribute to more labour power because of the high fertility rate, at the same time, the schemes the state makes for them limit them to pay half the wages and that too during the first birth only and no granted leaves so that there are least possible obstacles in the continuation of social reproduction, which is crucial for the everyday functioning of the capitalist economy.
The process of exclusion and discrimination operate together through the institutional structure to allow the stigma of untouchability to rigidly locate lower caste women within caste hierarchies, situating them in permanent servility. Such structures exclude women from lower castes from gaining maternity benefit schemes that might help them carry out their labour without risking their lives and their children’s (Rao, 2013)
Quite evidently, then, it’s not unnatural to think that lower-caste women face great difficulties in educating their children and enhancing their futures to break from the shackles of social reproduction. Despite understanding the mechanisms by which caste-based occupations contribute to the production of this structure, the complicity between the upper castes and the state to keep the caste system intact and, thereby caste/gender-specific labour alive in the new productive economies renders them in making such schemes that would structure its beneficiaries, here lower caste women to be perpetually caught within structural and ideological inequality in socioeconomic relations, which gets legitimised, in a way to maintain the divide between the caste-labour duality.
The Utopia of Public-Private Divide
Attempts to seek maternity protection and childcare support at the workplace and participate in the employment sector often lead to a disadvantaged position for women. This situation is called the “Wollstonecraft Dilemma”, an idea developed by Pateman (1989). Mary Wollstonecraft lays down two routes of citizenship for women– one as equal citizens as workers and contributors, which fails to recognise the difference in their capabilities with respect to men. The second route is that unpaid and domestic work be deemed productive and contributive to the welfare state. This manoeuvre relegates the public-private/ production-reproduction duality into the open but still drives women to the private sphere where despite policies and laws, they are continued to be viewed as the second sex.
However, it’s equally necessary to articulate how women carve their resistance and niche within such dominant structures of oppression Meena Gopal’s essay on the reproduction of caste and gender-based labour provides a major insight into how lower-caste women reject the notion of their work as polluting and instead mark their empowerment by safeguarding their work and preserving the domain in which their skill is valued. Further, the economic independence and livelihood these women experience lead them to be at crossroads with their families, discouraging them from abandoning such work and working towards upward mobility.
In a way, they strive to maintain a divide between their private and public labour, to be recognised as citizens contributing to the economy. However, with their menial jobs already being devoid of proper healthcare benefits, schemes like the PMMVY with its conditional cash transfer feature either push them back to the private sphere during and after their pregnancy or force them to resume work by carrying their children to their workplaces, wherein their private labour merges with their public labour, thus further blurring the divide. The scheme, therefore, bolsters the viewpoint by deliberately ignoring their contribution to the functioning of the capitalist economy.
References
GOPAL, M. (2013). Ruptures and Reproduction in Caste/Gender/Labour. Economic and Political Weekly, 48(18), 91–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23527313
Lingam, L, (2011). Reproductive Rights and Exclusionary Wrongs: Maternity Benefits. Economic and Political Weekly, 46, 94-103. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228843205_Reproductive_Rights_and_Exclusi onary_Wrongs_Maternity_Benefits.
Engels, F. (1902). The origin of the family, private property and the state.
Gopal, M. (2012). Caste, sexuality and labour: The troubled connection. Current
Sociology, 60(2), 222–238. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392111429223.
Delphy, C. (1988). Patriarchy, domestic mode of production, gender, and class. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 259–267). Macmillan Education UK. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19059-1_18
Nagarajan, R. (2018, January 12). Fertility rate below replacement level for all but Hindus & Muslims. Times Of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/fertility-rate-below-replacement-level-for-all-bu t-hindus-muslims/articleshow/62465588.cms .
Bikashita is a soon to be postgraduate in Gender Studies and has done her graduation in Journalism. Having a highly opinionated attitude and strong writing forte, she will soon kickstart her career in policy making space through LAMP fellowship. Her areas of Interests lie in issues pertaining to gender, intersectionality, policy, law and politics.
