Breaking down the question
The pivot of the question is changing nature. The examiner is not asking for a static list of the hardships of informal workers but for an account of how those problems have shifted over time — with liberalisation, globalisation, technological change and the informalisation of formal work itself.
The subject is the working class in the informal sector. This locates the answer within the sociology of work, and it carries a conceptual tension worth drawing out — whether the informal-sector workforce constitutes a working class in the classical sense at all, given its fragmentation and lack of collective organisation. A strong answer maps the older problems, then shows how their character has changed, and reflects on what this means for class formation.
How to approach it
Begin by defining the informal sector — Keith Hart's original coinage — and establishing its dominance in India, where the overwhelming majority of workers are informally employed. Then structure the answer around change. Sketch the older problems of informal labour: low and irregular wages, job insecurity, absence of legal protection, exploitation and the near-total lack of social security.
Then turn to how these problems have changed. Emphasise liberalisation, the informalisation of the formal sector through contractualisation and outsourcing, the rise of the platform and gig economy, migration circuits and the persistent gendering of informal work. Close by reflecting on the consequences for class consciousness and collective action, and on the policy response.
Model answer
The informal sector, a term coined by Keith Hart, refers to economic activity that lies outside state regulation, formal contracts and social-security provision. In India it is not a marginal residue but the dominant form of employment, engaging the large majority of the workforce across agriculture, construction, petty trade, domestic work and small manufacturing. The problems of this working class are long-standing, but their nature has changed markedly.
The older, structural problems. Classically, informal-sector workers faced low and fluctuating earnings, seasonal and irregular work, an absence of written contracts, and no protection against dismissal, injury or old age. Jan Breman's studies of Gujarat described a footloose labour force — casual, mobile and endlessly substitutable — bargaining from a position of chronic weakness. Exploitation was direct, debt bondage persisted, and the sheer surplus of labour kept wages depressed. These problems have not disappeared; they form the enduring baseline.
Informalisation of the formal sector. The most significant change followed liberalisation. Rather than the informal sector shrinking as the economy grew — as modernisation theory predicted — the formal sector has itself become informalised. Firms increasingly employ workers through contractors, on temporary and casual terms, to evade labour law and cut costs. The result is a growing mass of informal workers inside formally registered enterprises, deprived of the security their workplaces once offered. The old boundary between a protected formal core and an unprotected informal periphery has blurred.
Precarity and the platform economy. Newer still is the rise of platform and gig work — delivery riders, ride-hail drivers, digital piece-workers. This work is presented as entrepreneurial and flexible, but it reproduces informal-sector insecurity in a technological form: algorithmic control, no employer liability, income volatility and the absence of collective bargaining. Guy Standing's notion of the precariat captures this expanding condition of chronic insecurity, though its applicability to India's already-informal economy must be qualified.
Migration, gender and fragmentation. The informal working class is increasingly composed of circular migrants moving between village and city, whose problems now include the vulnerabilities of mobility itself — as the reverse-migration crisis of recent years exposed. Informal work remains deeply gendered, with women concentrated in the lowest-paid, least-visible tasks such as domestic and home-based work, compounding class disadvantage with patriarchal subordination.
Consequences for class formation. The changing nature of these problems has weakened the classical working class. Dispersal across countless small worksites, competition among a surplus workforce, the individualising rhetoric of gig work and the decline of stable factory employment all erode the shared conditions on which class consciousness and trade-union organisation once rested. The informal working class is real in its exploitation but fragmented in its capacity for collective action.
The policy response. Recognition has grown — the Unorganised Workers' Social Security Act, welfare boards, portable-benefit and registration schemes attempt to extend a minimal safety net. Yet coverage remains thin and enforcement weak. The central challenge is to provide security to a workforce whose defining feature is its escape from the categories through which security has traditionally been delivered.
In sum, the problems of the informal working class have moved from the classic deprivations of casual labour towards a generalised precarity that now reaches into the formal sector and the digital economy, even as the class itself becomes harder to organise.
Examiner's perspective
The word the examiner is testing is changing. Scripts that describe informal-sector hardship as a fixed condition — low wages, no security, exploitation — miss the analytical demand. The reward lies in tracing movement: from footloose casual labour, through post-liberalisation informalisation of the formal sector, to platform-based precarity.
Top answers connect these shifts to the wider question of class formation, noting that fragmentation undermines collective action, and they marshal Breman, Hart and Standing precisely rather than decoratively. Attention to migration and the gendering of informal work, together with an informed line on the limits of current social-security policy, signals the command of contemporary labour sociology that separates the highest band.