ABSTRACT
According to estimates by the World Bank and the International Labour Organization, over two-thirds of the world’s workforce now lives and works in the informal economy. Despite the colossal scale of the informal economy, the path to human welfare is persistently viewed as being via the much smaller formal economy and associated systems, which are themselves under threat from precarious work conditions. In India, we find that informal work is precarious but far from unskilled. Instead, we discover highly skilled work in India which is embedded in the lived psychological realities of informal workers, appropriately referred to as cultural skills leading to sustainable work. The informal sector has been studied and researched in numerous disciplines. In effect, the conceptualization of informality has become more complex with the porosity of boundaries in the social sciences.
