Economic Sectors
As of 2001, around 0.81% of the city's workforce was employed in the primary sector (agriculture, forestry, mining, etc.); 15.49% works in the secondary sector (industrial and manufacturing); and 83.69% worked in the tertiary sector (service industries). As of 2003, the majority of households in slums were engaged in occupations belonging to the informal sector; 36.5% were involved in servicing the urban middle class (as maids, drivers, etc.), and 22.2% were casual labourers. About 34% of the available labour force in Kolkata slums were unemployed.
Most of the slum dwellers participate in the informal economy and work in laundering, housecleaning, sweeping, plastic salvaging, plumbing, furniture making, electrical wiring, TV repair, masonry, messaging, hawking, rickshaw pulling, hair design, folk medicine, music and art, tailoring, leather work, shoe making, and food selling.Until recently, flexible production had always been the norm in Kolkata, and the informal sector has comprised more than forty percent of the labor force. For example, hawkers in Kolkata, numbering 275,000 generated business worth Rs. 8,772 crore (around 2 billion U.S. dollars) in 2005.
Read more about this topic: Economy Of Kolkata
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