The Employee State Insurance Scheme is the largest-integrated social security scheme for the “formal” workers in India, with c.30 million insured persons and over 140 million beneficiaries. We argue that historically, the Indian scheme parallels Beveridge’s theoretical conceptualisation of ‘social insurance and allied services’ during the welfare-state era. Here, the anthropology of social insurance in contemporary India is studied through a political economy approach by examining the historical and contemporary state of the ESI scheme and its services. The intersectionality of [industrial] labour employed, we argue through a heterodox perspective, allowed [industrial] business houses (both national and transnational corporations) to carry out primitive accumulation and continue the extraction of surplus value from a large existing industrial reserve army. The precariously employed [and intersectional, as argued] group involves a huge segment of informal workforce in contemporary industries. A majority of workers in hazardous work hired contractually are part of this informal sector, and fall outside the social security benefits extended by the state. The study presents scholarly evidence of auto-workers' experiences with ESI scheme, collected during the field work in Gurugram-Faridabad-Delhi industrial belt, and brings out the debate on increasing the coverage of ESI scheme by including informal workforce, or focussing on the quality of service delivery for existing workers, as mentioned in the vision ESIC 2.0. Furthermore, through a micro-perspective drawn from the case study, an overarching macro argument on the possibility of ESI scheme for the 93%+ workers in the informal sector is made. The dialectics of social security for formal and informal industrial workers, historically from the golden age of capitalism to the contemporary post-Fordist era of production and beyond, is brought out. The study through a political economy approach contributes to the contemporary subfield of anthropology of social insurance.
