Of Social Policy and Intervention

This paper examines the dual welfare system in India and the role of corporations as providers of social protection. The aim is to ascertain who is driving and providing social security, education, and health to informal and formal sector workers and their families. It further attempts to illuminate why corporations are taking steps to address some of welfare needs of the greater population as part of their corporate social responsibility programmes. Theoretically, this paper analyses India’s welfare provision through the theoretical lens of a dual welfare system and insider/outsider literature. It is argued that the formal and informal labour sectors in India are representative of two different welfare systems: the formal sector welfare system, comprised of ‘insiders’, and the informal sector welfare system, composed of ‘outsiders’. This welfare dualism is largely created along the lines of social security measures, which primarily define access to benefits based on the type of work establishment and the number of employees. The findings reveal that corporations are providing social protection to informal sector workers as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, in the form of education and health schemes, but they are not compensating for the dearth of Government welfare provision because of a moral imperative to ‘help’. We hypothesise that corporations are, in fact, providing social initiatives for their own corporate benefit. It is economic realism, not moral imperative, that is driving CSR in India.