Employment in terms of working status is broadly divided into three categories viz. regular salaried, self-employment and casual employment. ‘Regular salaried’ employment indicates secure and stable employment with assured regular income. ‘Self-employment’ in the Indian context is largely in agriculture and other small petty economic activities. Most often, the conditions of work and earnings in self-employment are highly vulnerable and unstable. Those engaged in self-employment activities may not have any social security. With a very few exceptions like professional occupations, self-employment is often fraught with uncertain or meagre returns, unless supported by adequate infrastructure and other social amenities like health and educational facilities to the dependent family members. ‘Casual employment’ is a kind of beck-and-call employment, with no regularity in employment, regular employer, adverse working conditions, uncertain wages and absence of any social security.

Development process is supposed to bring about shift of majority of workers from casual employment to self-employment and increasingly towards ‘regular and salaried’ employment. But, in India over the years there has been decline in ‘self-employment’ and increase in the share of ‘casual employment’, without hardly any increase in the share of ‘regular and salaried’ employment. There is thus an increasing tendency towards casualization of employment, more so since the introduction of reforms in the 1990s.