Further, more than half of men and nearly two-thirds of women among such self-employed workers reported monthly remuneration that is very low, indeed below the official minimum wages in most states. This, in turn, requires a significant rethinking of the way analysts and policy makers deal with the notion of “workers”. Several new policy problems emerge: the difficulty of ensuring decent conditions of work when the absence of a direct employer means that self-exploitation by workers in a competitive market is the greater danger; the difficulty of assessing and then ensuring “living wages” when wages are not received by such workers, who instead depend on uncertain returns from various activities that are typically petty in nature; the need to develop new forms of policy intervention to improve work conditions and strategies of worker mobilisation in this context.