Measuring the Gap Between Labour Laws and Work in India’s IT Industry and Policy Directions

Labour market institutions play a pivotal role in the formation and implementation of laws and regulations to protect the worker’s rights and interests. Ironically, as most of them are applicable only to organized form of employment, majority of the workers are devoid of their benefits. In India, workers of the Information Technology (IT) industry, which represents one of the most sophisticated forms of workplace, also do not benefit from the many labour laws due to the exemption of the industry from applicability of few welfare-oriented labour laws. This paper examines the nature of labour regulations in India and their prospective applicability to the IT industry. A second objective is to investigate conditions of work in the industry using the concept of decent work and discuss their variation across gender and other socio-demographic characteristics. Data has been collected from 272 IT employees using snowball sampling method and the results have been used to discuss the deficiencies in the work conditions despite the existing labour regulations. © 2017, Indian Society of Labour Economics.