Occupational Hazard Exposure and Health Disparities Among Older Adults In India: Evidence from Lasi-I

Background: India's unorganised sector employs over 90% of its workforce (ILO, 2020), yet occupational safety protections remain almost entirely absent for these workers. For ageing workers doing physically demanding, hazardous labour — stooping, lifting, working around pesticides and smoke daily — damage accumulates in bodies and minds in ways that income measures alone fail to capture. Existing research links low socioeconomic status (SES) to poor health in older adulthood, but rarely examines the contribution of working conditions themselves. This study explores the association between specific occupational hazard exposures and health outcomes among ageing unorganised workers in India. Examining this association above and beyond socioeconomic position can help ground demands for worker protection in concrete evidence, rather than subsuming them within the broader goal of poverty alleviation alone.

Methods: Data are drawn from Wave 1 of the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI), a nationally representative survey of adults aged 45 and above. Two occupational hazard subscores were constructed: a physical demand score (heavy physical effort, lifting, stooping/kneeling) and an environmental exposure score (smoke/exhaust, chemicals/pesticides, noxious odours), alongside total working hours as a compounding variable. Regression models examined associations between these scores and three health outcomes. These outcomes included functional limitations (ADLs and IADLs), mental health (CESD-10), and chronic disease diagnoses (arthritis, lung disease, hypertension), controlling for SES, age, gender, education, and asset holdings. An agricultural sub-analysis comparing landless, marginal, and small farmers who perform comparable labour but differ substantially in economic resources provided a sharper test of whether hazard exposure is associated with health above and beyond SES. Robust standard errors were used throughout.

Results: Preliminary findings indicate that occupational hazard exposure is associated with several adverse health outcomes among older agricultural workers. Environmental exposure correlated with significantly increased odds of arthritis (OR=1.03, p<0.05) and lung disease (OR=1.06, p<0.01), as well as higher depression scores on the CESD-10. Crucially, these patterns remained robust even after controlling for wealth, land value, and asset holdings. Furthermore, greater physical job demands were linked to increased functional limitations in ADLs. Mental health emerged as a particularly underdocumented burden, with environmental exposure acting as a significant correlate of depressive symptoms even among workers who remain functionally active. Full results from the agricultural sub-analysis will be presented at the conference.

Conclusions: These findings support occupational safety as a rights-based, unionisable demand for India's ageing, unorganised workforce. This demand is distinct from and complementary to broader poverty alleviation efforts. For social work research and policy, this underscores the urgency of advocating for enforceable safety protections in the unorganised sector and of documenting mental health as a labour rights issue rather than an exclusively clinical one. Future work will employ structural equation modelling to examine the complete exposure, health, and economic pathway.