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Healthy Worker Makes a Healthy Nation than Healthy

Business
A country’s most essential wealth is its people, one who is building up Nation. Making
healthier benefit to its people is best move towards healthier Nation. Consequently a healthier
workforce requires only less sick days which will enable them not be pushed into debts to
meet the catastrophe of treatment by way of reducing out of pocket expenditure wherein
country will enjoy with height productivity of its workers1. The good health status of people
of the country is an indication of development of the nations as world health organisation
declared that the prime enemy in the developing world is poverty which block informing
health workers who makes an important contribution to economic progress, as healthy
populations live longer, are more productive, and save more2.

However the country likes India, in which no trend to build up employee’s well-being,
especially those who are working in informal economy. While on the contrary recent
leaning seems to be essay on business in terms of Government’s recent steps in the form of
regulations that have been cited as indications3 for the atmosphere of investor’s attraction into
the country (Business Today, 2017). Of late these efforts promoted International Agency’s
like Moody’s Cooperation and Standard & Poor Global Ratings to assess India as business
friendly country. It sounds that under the ‘essay business’ slogan the Nation could be
highlighted as if flattering healthy country at the same time India faces a low rate of
productivity among the work force.

Low Productivity Workers

2015th World Economic Forum’s report 19 charts has been explained on India’s economic
challenges, where cited the labour productivity was below 20 percent. This assessment was
made after considering the four sectors: agriculture, manufacturing, marketing and service
(World Economic Forum, 2015) . It again explained in India the GDP per capita of a worker

1
. www. centerforwellnessandnutrition.org
2
. http://www.who.int/hdp/poverty/en/
3
. World Bank's ease of doing business ranking list in 2018. Based on the 10 indicators. Such as Starting a
business, Dealing with construction permits, Getting electricity, Registering property, Getting credit, Protecting
minority investors, Paying taxes, Trading across borders, Enforcing contracts and Resolving insolvency
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is 1. 627 US dollar and output of a worker is 10. 249 US dollar(World Economic Forum,
2014) .

The average productivity of Indian worker against country’s GDP and purchasing power
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from 1992 to 2017 is 5. 52percent . Yet again, this period also witnessed a rise in inequality,
which has been mainly driven by income gaps between a growing urban-rural divide (World
Economic Forum, 2015). It happens mainly because of Indian rural economy depend on
unorganised sector workers including home and agricultural workers. The present study using
NSSO data from years 1991 to 2011the unorganised sector accounts for almost 80 per cent
employment and generates only about 33 per cent of output of the manufacturing sector.
Other sectors of unorganised workers productivity data are not available but the study
observed the low output of this sector workers credited to factors like e.g low capital per
worker and health of workers (Paul Bino, 2016) .

Unhealthy and Unsafe Workers

On 20th November eight workers were killed at ongoing tunnelling work for the Bhima-Nira
river linking project near village Akole at Bhigwan, Pune (Nyooz,2017) The death of 32
workers and serious injuries to other workers were reported from power plant operated by
the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) in Unchahar, Raebareli district, Uttar
Pradesh in the beginning of this month (EPW.2017 ) and the death of 39 sewer worker
within 100 days across Indian in a year once stated by National Safai Karmachari Andolan(
Times of India, 2017) . All these are only some of the incidents which have been occurring
from corner to corner in India daily, due to heartless disregard for worker’s safety and the
violation of labour laws. Unfortunately, these tragedies time and again is going on even in
the regulated and organized sector or a small unit operating outside regulated set ups and
much in large informal economy sectors. The majority of these workers have been affecting
are migrant- contract workers or brought to the units by contractors to whom jobs were being
subcontracted apart from 37.4 million home-based workers of India according to NSSO
2011-12. Including this group informal worker comes above 90 percent of workforce of the
country, which would make the financial wellness nation 56 percent (NCEUS 2007).

4
. CEIC calculates Labour Productivity
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The landscape changes of work today in terms of patterns and working relationship, the rise
in self-employment, greater sub-contracting, oust sourcing of work, home-based work and
increasing number of employees working in outside industry units create problems of safety
and health risks at workplaces. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) statistics from
2003 claimed that 403,000 people died from work-related problems in India (Zeenews,
2017). This translates to about 46 people is dying per hour. Still today there no updated
statistic seems to be available in this regard. One private study cited that during the period of
2010 to 2015, in India the 39 percent of deaths happened in the working-age population ie
15-64 years. The country has witnessed 19 million deaths among working-age group people
that are the highest in the world. Among them accounted for 58 percent of workforce deaths,
23 percent also happened due to communicable diseases and another 35 percent due to
injuries of workplace (Zeenews, 2017).

No Assurance of Workers’ Health.

As a immediate effect of the Supreme Court direction in September 2016, the Centre
Government during the last parliament session with aim of ‘sick care’ to ‘wellness,
cleared National Health Policy 2017, which promises to increase public health spending to
2.5 percent of GDP in a time-bound manner and guarantees health care services to all Indian
citizens, particularly the underprivileged. But the same policy failed to acknowledge much-
demanded right based healthcare elements, which would have been legal consequences and
sustainability like ESIS, CGHS and ECHS schemes have been giving to formal employees.

More than that a RTI inquiry has revealed the phasing out attitude of Government towards
Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) which was launched in 2008 for Below Poverty
Line (BPL) households, later has been expanded to cover other 11 defined categories of
unorganised workers which comes from almost above 90 percent of workforce of the country
by the intention of universal health security in country. This is in spite of last year's Budget,
wherein finance minister promised a health cover of Rs 1 lakh for each poor family under the
National Health Protection Scheme, which yet to be on the go.

The same RTI reply cited that RSBY currently implementation taking places only 15 States:
Karnataka, Kerala, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh,
Uttarakhand, Bihar, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura. This is
lowest in number of States wherein the scheme has been implementing in the history of
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RSBY since 2008. After the health ministry took over from Labour and Employment ministry
in 2015 the RSBY scheme of cashless health cover of up to Rs 30,000 is provided for a
maximum of five members of a family, the officials opined most of the States are not
wholehearted on put into operation RSBY. This entire step seems to be moving back off from
the well accepted by international bodies like WHO as a potential right based universal health
scheme of RSBY.

Actually, the ‘working poor’s medical expense stands second reason of Indian indebtedness
as an ailing fact in the development efforts. In the year of 2015 National Health Policy Draft
of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has cited over 63 million people has been pushing
into poverty every year in India because of expenditure of health care. It indicated 86 percent
of rural population and 82 percent of the urban population were still not covered under any
schemes either public or private, to support health expenditure. Among workers of the
country, only 8 percent is having some sort of health security.

ILO study opined health micro insurance like RSBY offers a hopeful way put to alleviate
risks of disease and ill health. In addition to financial protection from health shock the health
micro insurance enable the ‘working poor’ to access quality health care by building up health
seeking behaviour instead of self-diagnose and self –mange –illness.

The national policy on safety and health at work, adopted by the government in 2009, is yet
to be enforced. The workers' safety and health scenario is a multifaceted reality in India since
being a fast-growing economy, which is largest democratic country in the world and having a
large number of population of 1.2 billion. The large section in unorganised sector workers ,
cheap labour accessibility, skimpy public spending on health, inadequate execution of
existing legislation, lack of reliable employee’s safety and health data, shortage of
occupational safety and health professionals, diversity of statutory controls and
infrastructure problems are main factors of occupational safety and health issue become
more complex in the country .

In this background, the studies, again and again, are asserting that the poor well-being of
people of the India remains one of the most common grounds of deficiency in human society.
The insufficient health security ruins as one of the major development defect factors today.
The Declaration of Alma-Ata International Conference on Primary Health Care, 1978, in
which India is one of the signatories referred that World health organisation says ‘better
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health' makes an important contribution to economic progress, as healthy populations live

longer, are more productive, save more, and invest for education of children, who are future
of a nation. Of late, the introduction of Good Service Tax (GST) and the leap from 130 of
last year into 100th position in the World Bank business report out of 190 countries have
been prompted to say India is an easy doing business place. In addition, the digitalization
impact would be happened the transformation informal into the formal segment which raises
tax payment to Government. With all these features Indian economy claims that it is on the
way of modernizing with dropping in the manual work and increasing use of the machine in
the labour sector as if formalizing workers force in the country but not looking forward the
real asset of the Nation that is workers.

Jose Vattakuzhy

Founder Director, Workers’ India Federation (WIF)

Email: josevattakuzhy2015@gmail.com

20th November 2017 for (Indian Current )