Playing With the Livelihoods of Civil Defense Volunteers in Delhi: A Mockery of the Aspirations of Job-Seeking Youth
In November 2023, over 10,000 Civil Defense volunteers in Delhi, were on the verge of being terminated. Their salaries had been withheld since April 2023. For a while it seemed that they would lose their jobs. Protests by these volunteers eventually led the Chief Secretary and the Chief Minister come to a joint agreement: that these volunteers would be recruited as Home Guards by March 2024.
While their jobs were saved, no announcement was made about the disbursal of their pending salaries as Bus Marshalls. It remains to be seen whether the dual government of Delhi adheres to the joint declaration. Even if they do, the plight of the volunteers says something about the pathetic situation that India’s job-seeking youth find themselves in.
The non-payment of salaries was due to certain questions over the legality of their appointments. As per the Civil Defense Act, the basic role of these volunteers is to assist the local administration. But question marks persisted over the ad-hoc nature of their recruitment by various government departments and their deployment for a range of activities in which they are not supposed to be deployed as per the Act.
According to the Civil Defense Act, 1968, the role of Civil Defense volunteers is defined as any measure which does not amount to actual combat, but protects persons, property and places from hostile attack. The government amended the Act several times, the latest being in 2010, when it expanded the definition by including disaster management as one of the responsibilities.
The basic role of the volunteers is to assist the local administration but they have been engaged in various jobs, including assisting the administration in campaigns such as 'Red Light On, Gaadi Off' and in sub registrar offices for different kinds of works. They also acted as frontline workers during the pandemic and played a key role in relief work during the Delhi floods this year.
Out of 10,792 Civil Defense volunteers, 8,574 had been engaged by the transport department as Bus Marshals in Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) and cluster buses. Revenue, Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), environment food and supplies, trade and taxes, and election, are some of the other departments that utilized their services.
Whatever be the legal loopholes, if the government recruited them, it is their responsibility to pay them and assure them stable jobs. The government’s callous attitude is a reflection of the prevailing mood of mainstream parties in Indian politics with regard to jobs: informalization, ad-hoc recruitment, and hire and fire polices dominate the employment sector.
The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for 2022-23 indicates that two key employment indicators - labour force participation rate and worker population ratio – have both shown improvement, while the unemployment rate has declined. However, the report also shows that precarious jobs, low earnings and unpaid work have become a pervasive feature of India’s economy.
In 2018-19, self-employed persons made up 52% of all employed, those earning a regular wage or salary were 24% and casual labour were 24%. By 2022-23, the share of self-employed had increased to 57% while the shares of both regular wage earners and casual labour had declined.
Self-employed persons are those who are working in a mind-boggling diversity of jobs from agriculture to petty shop keepers, rickshaw pullers, repair workers, and service providers of various kinds, with very low job security, practically no social security and meagre incomes. So, this is the first sign that the increased employment is simply a reflection of desperate people doing any kind of work to survive.
Employment as Civil Defense volunteers is not ‘self-employment’ of course but it is a clear symptom of how desperate people are for work: despite not being paid for months young people are reluctant to leave these jobs because there are hardly any better options available.
The possible arbitrary termination also stems from a system where the very definition of jobs is tailored to make hire-and-fire easy. To take an example from a different part of the country, on 13th December, 2022, 155 workers were arbitrarily terminated from employment by Yazaki India Pvt Ltd., an Indian arm of a Japanese company that manufactures automobile parts in the outskirts of Bangalore in Karnataka. When questioned about the mass illegal termination, the management claimed that the workers were not on their rolls, but were apprentices, who they could terminate at will.
Coming back to Delhi, the fate of the Civil Defense volunteers may surprise some because the political party concerned is none other than the apparently pro-worker Aam Aadmi Party. During its ascendancy, there was a concerted effort to appeal to the working class, by promising policies that would include affordable water supply, and conduct an audit of Delhi’s electricity distribution companies.
A significant section of workers did support the AAP, as did a section of Dalits. The policies passed however carried little material weight in the lives of working people and were mainly of populist rhetoric. AAP rule has witnessed several protests by Delhi’s working classes.
Workers of Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC), which is an important feature of Delhi’s public transport system, broke out in massive protests in 2015. At least 12,000 DTC workers hired on contractual basis remain to be made permanent employees. Without making any attempts to negotiate with the workers, the AAP invoked the Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA) to suppress the protests. This law has been used countless times by the AAP, recently to suppress the protests of Anganwadi workers.
The Anganwadi workers of Delhi who work as the backbone of the city’s maternal welfare and childcare struck work in January 2022, demanding better pay, regularized work, and recognition as government employees rather than volunteers. In 2017, the AAP government had promised to add Rs. 500/- to the remuneration of Anganwadi workers (and Rs. 250/- for helpers) as internet allowance. Workers claim that this was soon reduced to Rs. 200/- and never paid.
The Civil Defence volunteers must not be left to fend for themselves, with no one to fight with them in their struggle for regular salaries and stable employment. Their struggle is a part of Young India’s struggle to build a secure future for themselves. While the Narendra Modi government has fallen short of its job-creation promises and consistently converted permanent jobs into contractual ones, other parties may do no better, unless pressurized by powerful mass movement of workers and the youth.
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