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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Women are the engines of the Indian economy but our contribution is ignored -Jayati Ghosh

Women are the engines of the Indian economy but our contribution is ignored -Jayati Ghosh

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published Published on Jul 20, 2016   modified Modified on Jul 20, 2016
-TheGuardian.com

Hardworking women in India care for family members, cook, clean, garden, sew and farm without getting paid. When will official statistics recognise this?

Women’s participation in work is an indicator of their status in a society. Paid work offers more opportunities for women’s agency, mobility and empowerment, and it usually leads to greater social recognition of the work that women do, whether paid or unpaid.

Where women’s work participation rates are relatively low, it is safe to say that the surrounding society isn’t giving women the capacities, opportunities and freedom to engage in productive work, nor recognising the vast amount of work performed by women as unpaid labour.

In India, where the economy has been growing rapidly over the past 30 years, recent statistics appear to show that women’s workforce participation rates (already low by international standards) have declined. Is there something about Indian society and the nature of economic growth that has led to this historically unprecedented combination of trends?

Estimates of employment in India are based on surveys conducted periodically (not every year) by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). It said that in 1999-2000, 35% of rural women and 17% of women over 15 years old were “working”, as regular or casual wage workers, self-employed or unpaid helpers in family enterprises (like farms or small shops). By 2011-12 (the most recent survey published), after a period of rapid economic growth, this has declined to 25% in rural areas and remained at the same pitifully low rate in urban areas.

However, this definition of employment excludes some important activities that are definitely work (sometimes very hard work) and contribute critically to the economy, but are not recognised as such by the surveys – or by policymakers and society.

In India’s NSSO one category excluded from employment (and therefore even from being counted in the labour force) is code 92: those who “attended to domestic duties only”. That includes all the activities that constitute the care economy, that is looking after the young, the sick and the elderly as well as other healthy household members, cooking, cleaning and provisioning for the family, and so on. Another category excluded is code 93: those who “attended to domestic duties and were also engaged in free collection of goods (vegetables, roots, firewood, cattle feed), sewing, tailoring, weaving, etc for household use”.

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TheGuardian.com, 16 July, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/jul/16/womens-workforce-participation-declining-india


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