Context:

• The latest periodic labour force survey of 2017-18 shows that only about 23% of working-age women are employed, down from 31% in 2011-12 and 43% in 2004-05.
• It is working-age rural women who have gone from 49% in 2004-05 to 36% in 2011-12 and now 25% in 2017-18.
• Despite more girls are staying longer in school, it’s not getting more of them into the workforce. Women are leaving paid jobs at all levels of education, age and income.
• If Indian women had the same work participation rates as men, Oxfam estimated that the GDP of India would rise by 43%.

Trends shown by PLFS 2017-18

• The unemployment rate (UR) in both rural and urban India is at its highest since 1972.
• Labour force participation has been declined to 36.9% in 2017-18.
• Among people aged 15-29 years, the share of the educated was 65.8% for urban males. It was 65.4% for urban females.
• In urban areas, the unemployment rates for females are higher than those for males.
• Unemployment among rural not-literate females has reduced.
• The UR has also sharply increased among those who are more educated.

The answers:

The first and biggest reason: Education.

• School enrolment increased across caste and gender in the last 10-15 years, drawing in girl child labourers, and keeping them in school.
• Schemes like bicycles for teenage girls and scholarships also encouraged schooling.
• It is leading to “a revolution of rising aspirations.
• Now teenage girls do not want to get married till 21 and want a graduate degree.
• They do not want to work in fields or do the manual work as their mothers did.

Non reporting

• Some Women might be doing piece-rate work at home but neither she nor her family would identify this as proper work to surveyors.

Greater mechanisation in agriculture,

• It has displaced some of the winnowing and threshing work that women do.
• Real wages rose because of nonagricultural jobs growing and overall peak investment. However, since women apparently tend to be withdrawn from the workforce when family incomes increase, so less women are available for work outside the household. It is a peculiar form of “backward bending labour supply curve” for households, where labour supply falls when earnings rise, that is the outcome of patriarchy!

High unemployment rate:

• Open unemployment is at a 45-year high of 6.1%.
• Construction work has fallen, and manufacturing jobs like labour-intensive textiles industry, where women work — have fallen.
• Women’s jobs are seen as more dispensable, and are lower-paid.

Suggestions:

• Less educated rural women who have lost farm jobs have few options apart from MGNREGA and self employment as small vendors.
  • The best thing for them is to boost self-help groups, for which funding has been increasing. In China, the non-farm rural economy has grown rapidly, and India needs a similar focus.
• The only dignified jobs for rural women are as Asha or Anganwadi workers. Asha, Anganwadi and midday meal workers make up nearly a crore of women, who bear heavy responsibilities for the community’s nutrition and health, early childhood and maternal care but are not recognised as fixed workers.
• Scaling up paid care-work – The government of India spends barely 1.2% of the GDP on health, roughly 3% on education. These are labour intensive sectors that employ women.
• Expanding network of community frontline workers, and strengthening health and education and social services would not only directly employ women, it would shift the burden from the bulk of women who work at home without pay, and undergird the paid work of others.
• Increasing public spending on traditionally unpaid “women’s work”.
• Creating more accommodation for working women in semi-urban areas, improving transportation, starting skilling centres near manufacturing clusters, encouraging entrepreneurship.