3 ideas
When manufacturing tasks like cutting threads off jeans or packing and assembling goods are outsourced to women working at home for piece rates, the labour vanishes from official view. No factory, employer, or contract exists to regulate, so wages can be pushed below subsistence while the work still feeds formal supply chains. Informality is produced by design, not left over from underdevelopment.
Work passes from brand to exporter to contractor to local middleman to the woman at home, and each layer takes a cut. By the time the work reaches her, no one in the chain counts as her employer. Accountability for wages, safety, or delayed payment disappears exactly where the worker is most vulnerable.
Follow a single poor household across decades and events like liberalisation, slum demolitions, demonetisation, communal riots, and the COVID lockdown stop looking like separate headlines. They appear as a series of shocks that each wipe out savings, jobs, or housing. This shows how macro-policy is actually experienced at the bottom: as repeated forced restarts, not as trend lines.