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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Working women numbers don’t add up -Rukmini Shrinivasan
-The Times of India


In English Vinglish, her big comeback movie last year, Sridevi's Shashi Godbole was a small-scale caterer in Pune before the movie's arc took her to the US. We saw her efficiency at making boondi laddoos, we saw that her clients loved them and we know she made a little money from it. But we also saw how little her enterprise mattered to her family, and that her husband actively dismissed of it. So here's a puzzle: if surveyors had shown up at her door and asked Shashi if she did any economically productive activity , would she have said yes?

An unclear number of Indian women do some amount of paid work but for a variety of reasons are not counted as part of the workforce by official surveyors, a range of economists now agree. Some of these are faults of the surveying process, others are how women see and report their role in the home. The problem is significant enough for the government to have acknowledged it and come up with a new method of measuring work.

Why was there a fall in figures?

The best and most widely used source of information on the number of workers, both male and female, and the type of work they do is the Employment and Unemployment Survey conducted every five years since 1972-3 by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) which works under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. India's statistical programme in general, and the NSSO surveys in particular, are considered to be world-class in their data quality and analysis.

When the results of the 2009-10 Employment and Unemployment Survey came out in late 2011, there was an uproar among labour economists and women's groups over the rates of female workforce participation. The numbers showed a nearly 10 percentage point decline in the already low number of women who reported that they were either employed or seeking employment. Among the various explanations that economists and sociologists came up with was this fundamental one - was the data right?

Former chief statistician Pronab Sen, who has himself overseen the NSSO's functioning in the past, argued that a lack of probing questions on the part of poorly trained enumerators could explain much of the fall. "There is a huge range of economic activities that women all around us are doing - running tuition classes, creches , catering, making handicrafts - that I think are not being properly captured because it is irregular or part-time work," says Preet Rustagi, professor and joint director of the Delhi-based Institute of Human Development . But this is a fixable problem, Rustagi says. "In rural areas, it was a common problem that women who tended to cattle would not consider their work to be economically productive even if the cow's milk was later sold in the market. But sensitization programmes for NSSO field staff helped this number double or triple for some states like Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s," Rustagi says.

Capturing self-employment is difficult

India's current chief statistician TCA Anant says that criticism of the survey process has been "partly overstated" . Over the last five to six years, as a result of the department's inability to fill vacancies in enumerator positions quickly enough, an increasing number are being hired on a contract basis, Anant admits. "But it isn't correct to say that they weren't properly trained," Anant says, and is unwilling to attribute any impact to the reduced presence of full-time enumerators. "Our economy is different from others in a number of significant ways. The jobs that you or I do are easily explained. But there is a much higher proportion of self-employment in India, and capturing this work becomes difficult," Anant says. Moreover, a recent investigation by the International Labour Organization (ILO) into India's female workforce participation data has revealed that while the 2009-10 data might have undercounted women's work, the previous round might have over-counted it. Economists Steven Kapsos and Andrea Silberman of the ILO's Geneva office studied labour force data for the last 20 years and created a parallel set of numbers after accounting for the data collection errors made by the NSSO during each survey. The difference between their numbers and the NSSO numbers is fairly consistent over the last 20 years (except in 2005), so if the NSSO is making mistakes in collecting data, it seems to be making them at a consistent rate over time, the ILO analysis indicates.

New surveys to measure 'time-use'

The government acknowledges there is a problem. One of the world's foremost experts on labour and labour measurement is Indira Hirway, director and professor of Economics at Center for Development Alternatives , Ahmedabad. Hirway is chairperson of a technical committee set up by the Union government to explore the feasibility of adding 'time-use surveys' to the NSSO's schedule. A time-use survey would ask the respondent how she spent, say, the preceding day, irrespective of whether she thought the activity was economically productive or not. In contrast, the current labour force survey asks the person to report whether she is usually or currently working or not, and in which industry. While countries like Australia give the respondent a diary which they must fill out and submit, India's literacy rates will need a house-to-house survey, Anant said.

"Time-use surveys help improve estimates of the male and female workforce. They also give insight into the characteristics of the workforce, whether the person is doing multiple jobs, the intensity of work, and simultaneous activities," Hirway told STOI. "It gives an insight into human existence and is a useful complement to the current labour force surveys," Anant said.

Hirway is currently leading a new pilot study to sort out operational and methodological issues, but the government is inprinciple committed to the NSSO conducting time-use surveys in a staggered manner in the near future, Anant said. In addition, the ILO has recommended that the NSSO have more female enumerators , train its staff well, spend more time with each household and conduct its existing labour survey annually, says Sher Verick , senior employment specialist at the ILO's Delhi office.