Understanding the Seasonal Nature of India’s Unorganised Manufacturing Sector

India’s factories don’t end at the gates of large industrial estates. Far beyond those gates lies a sprawling world of tiny workshops, household units, and roadside enterprises that together make up the unorganised manufacturing sector. These are the bidi rollers, weavers, garment stitchers, brick makers, and food processors who collectively run nearly 20 million enterprises and employ a huge share of the manufacturing workforce. But the rhythm of their work is anything but uniform. Some enterprises hum along the entire year, others light up only during specific months, and many operate only when an opportunity briefly appears. This blog unpacks why the unorganised manufacturing sector runs on three very different clocks, and what that means for the workers, especially women, who depend on it.

What counts as unorganised manufacturing 🔗

Before getting to the seasonal rhythm, it helps to know what we are talking about. In statistical terms, an unorganised manufacturing enterprise is an unincorporated household unit, run on a proprietary or partnership basis, that is not registered under the Companies Act. As per the latest Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE), there were about 20 million such manufacturing units in 2024, compared with only around 200,000 operational organised factories. Nearly two-thirds of these units sit in rural areas, and most are run by a single person.

The National Sample Survey Office traditionally classifies these enterprises into three categories. Own Account Manufacturing Enterprises (OAMEs) are run without any hired worker on a regular basis, usually by family labour alone. Non-Directory Manufacturing Establishments (NDMEs) employ at least one hired worker but have fewer than six total workers. Directory Manufacturing Establishments (DMEs) employ six or more workers but stay below the threshold of the Factories Act. As recorded in an NSSO report on unorganised manufacturing, OAMEs alone account for around 93 per cent of rural unorganised units and about 71 per cent of urban ones. This skew towards the smallest, family-run units is what makes the sector so vulnerable to shifts in season, demand, and household circumstances.

The three rhythms of work: perennial, seasonal, and casual 🔗

The NSSO classifies enterprises not only by size but also by the nature of their operations, which broadly captures how many months in a year they actually run. There are three categories, and each describes a very different working life.

Perennial enterprises 🔗

A perennial enterprise operates more or less throughout the year. It may shut for a festival or a short break, but its production cycle is not tied to a particular season. Most engineering workshops, tailoring units, small bakeries, and general repair establishments fall in this group. According to NSSO data on unorganised manufacturing, in rural India around 889 out of every 1,000 enterprises were perennial and operating, while in urban India the share rose to about 965 out of 1,000. Urban units are far more likely to be perennial because they serve a continuous market of customers and have less dependence on weather or harvests.

Seasonal enterprises 🔗

A seasonal enterprise operates only during certain parts of the year, usually because its raw material, demand, or working conditions are themselves seasonal. Brick kilns are the most famous example: they run only during the dry months between roughly November and June, because monsoon rains make brick moulding and firing impossible. As one study on unorganised manufacturing notes, brick-making units are usually kept out of the organised manufacturing count precisely because of the seasonal and shifting nature of operations. Other examples include sugarcane crushing units, jaggery making, pickle and papad making, festival-linked production of idols or fireworks, and parts of the handloom and tobacco industries that depend on agricultural cycles. NSSO estimates put seasonal units at roughly 62 per 1,000 rural enterprises and 17 per 1,000 urban enterprises.

Casual enterprises 🔗

Casual enterprises are neither perennial nor seasonal. They operate in short, irregular bursts whenever an opportunity arises, for example, when a wedding season generates extra demand for sweets or decorations, or when a contractor places a one-off order. These are the smallest and most precarious segment, making up only about 11 per 1,000 enterprises in rural areas and 3 per 1,000 in urban areas. Despite their small share, casual enterprises matter because they often act as a safety net for the poorest households, who fold up the unit when work disappears and reopen it when conditions improve.

Why work is uncertain even when jobs exist 🔗

One of the puzzles of unorganised manufacturing is that workers often struggle to find consistent work even when the broader sector appears to have year-round demand. The reasons sit at three levels.

Seasonality of activity itself 🔗

Where the enterprise is genuinely seasonal, the worker is paid for only part of the year. A brick-kiln family that migrates from eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, or Odisha to a kiln in Punjab or Haryana typically works for six to eight months. Outside this window, they must return to their villages and find agricultural or casual urban work to bridge the gap. This pattern produces uncertain job security, with employment that is casual, seasonal, or daily-wage based, even though the worker is, on paper, employed in manufacturing.

Fragmented demand in urban areas 🔗

In urban India, most enterprises are perennial, but workers still face uneven employment. A garment cluster in Delhi or Tirupur may have orders flowing in all year, yet a particular subcontracting unit may receive work only when a larger exporter routes an order to it. This subcontracting chain means that unorganised and subcontracted work falls outside the ambit of labour legislation and is characterised by a lack of social security, and individual workers may sit idle for weeks between assignments. Add to this the absence of written contracts, and the worker has neither a guarantee of work nor a route to claim wages for the time spent waiting.

Constraints on the enterprises themselves 🔗

A recent study in the Economic and Political Weekly using unit-level data for 2010-11, 2015-16, and 2023-24 finds that falling demand is the most severe constraint these units face, followed by finance-related constraints, with labour, power, and raw material problems being less prominent. When demand softens, enterprises do not always close down but they reduce working hours or rotate workers, passing the uncertainty directly to the workforce. So even within a perennial unit, the volume of work available to any one worker can fluctuate sharply across the year.

Where women fit into this picture 🔗

Gender shapes almost every aspect of the unorganised manufacturing sector, from the type of enterprise a worker enters to the rhythm of work she can sustain. According to the National Sample Survey Office, women make up about 43 per cent of the informal manufacturing workforce, while their share in formal manufacturing has fallen from 20.9 per cent in 2015-16 to 18.9 per cent in 2022-23. In other words, women are not absent from manufacturing; they are concentrated in its most informal, lowest-paying corners.

Women cluster in a few specific industries 🔗

The five activity groups of apparel, tobacco products, textiles, food products, and wood and furniture together account for over 80 per cent of unorganised manufacturing units. Women are disproportionately present in the first four. In the informal tobacco sector, for example, over 90 per cent of workers are women, and a similar pattern shows up in bidi rolling, agarbatti making, and pickle and papad preparation. The 2019-20 Handloom Census reported that of the 35 million unorganised handloom workers across the country, around 25 million, or 72.3 per cent, were women. These are exactly the industries most exposed to seasonality and subcontracting fluctuations.

Home-based work and the productivity penalty 🔗

A second gender pattern is location. A study published in Small Business Economics finds that almost 95 per cent of female-owned firms in the unorganised manufacturing sector operate from within the household premises. This is not a free choice; it reflects gendered norms that place the burden of unpaid care work on women and restrict their mobility outside the home. The same study estimates that operating from inside the home explains 19 to 36 per cent of the gender gap in productivity between male and female-owned firms. Home-based women workers also become invisible in many official statistics, with the World Bank historically estimating that a large share of women in the informal sector are not counted in mainstream labour data.

Preferred but penalised 🔗

Employers in apparel, garments, electronics assembly, and bidi rolling often prefer women for repetitive, low-skilled tasks on the basis of stereotypes of patience and docility. The same stereotypes are then used to justify low wages, contract or piece-rate employment, and limited training. The result is that women are over-represented in seasonal and casual units precisely because such units rely on a flexible, cheap workforce that can be hired and let go quickly. When a seasonal pickle unit shuts down after the mango harvest, it is mostly women whose income disappears.

Why this matters for policy and research 🔗

The threefold classification of perennial, seasonal, and casual enterprises is not just statistical bookkeeping. It tells us that a single labour policy cannot serve such a diverse sector. A perennial urban tailoring unit needs access to credit and steady orders. A seasonal brick kiln needs portable social security and protection for migrant families. A casual home-based unit needs recognition as a workplace so that the woman who runs it can access maternity benefits, health insurance, and skill upgrading. The eShram portal, the e-Shram database, and recent expansions of social security under the Code on Social Security, 2020 are steps in this direction, but their reach to seasonal and home-based women workers remains uneven.

Understanding the seasonal nature of unorganised manufacturing also reframes how we read employment data. A month-by-month survey may show a worker as employed in July and unemployed in October, even though she is the same person doing the same kind of work in the same household. The volatility is built into the structure of the sector, not into the worker. Recognising that pattern is the first step to designing programmes that smooth incomes across the year rather than assuming a steady factory pay cheque that, for most of these workers, simply does not exist.

What do you think? If a woman bidi roller works from her doorstep for nine months a year, takes a forced break during the lean season, and is not on any factory register, should she be counted as a manufacturing worker, an informal worker, or something entirely new? And what kind of social protection design would actually reach her without forcing her to leave the home-based setup that lets her balance paid work with care responsibilities?

References

1. https://www.dataforindia.com/unorganised-manufacturing/
2. https://www.mospi.gov.in/sites/default/files/publication_reports/479_final.pdf
3. https://mospi.gov.in/sites/default/files/publication_reports/434_final.pdf
4. https://ras.org.in/index.php?Article=growth_of_unorganised_manufacturing_in_india
5. https://csr.education/development-in-india/unorganised-sector-india-definitions-characteristics/
6. https://idronline.org/article/gender/how-many-women-does-indias-manufacturing-sector-employ/
7. https://www.epw.in/journal/2026/16/indias-industrial-transformation/unorganised-manufacturing-enterprises-india.html
8. https://www.thestudyias.com/blogs/women-in-manufacturing/
9. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11187-022-00637-2
10. https://www.impriindia.com/insights/feminisation-of-labour-in-india-gender/
11. https://labour.gov.in/sites/default/files/ss_code_gazette.pdf