DNA Edit: Women workforce numbers in India dismal

A new World Bank report has India’s head hanging in shame. In its India Development Report, the World Bank states that India’s female labour force participation rates are one of the lowest in the world, lower compared to even our sub-continental neighbours like Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. In fact, Nepal is miles ahead of India as 80 per cent of its women of 15 years or older are working.

Contrasted with this, only 27 per cent of women in the same age bracket are working in India. There is some consolation that we still fare better than Pakistan, which only has 25 per cent of women in the 15 years and above age bracket working, but we should not lose sight of the fact that Pakistan’s economy is beset with a host of infrastructural and energy issues, while ours is one registering a blistering pace in terms of GDP growth.

The situation gets even more depressing. An overwhelming 60 per cent of women in the 26-45 age bracket are not economically active, which is to say that they are neither working on a farm or in a business and neither are they earning any wage.

Here, once again we have the dubious credit of standing ahead of only socially regressive societies or war-torn economies like that of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, and far behind other Asian neighbours. Further, only around 40 per cent of women in India, who have graduated from colleges, join the workforce.

The report posits “disguised unemployment” as the possible reason behind such counter-intuitive data of higher education accompanying such low-labour participation. The term “disguised unemployment” suggests that women choose to continue to study in the face of adverse economic and job prospects.

In India, over 63 per cent of women’s workforce is involved in agriculture, while the industry and service sector account for less than a third of it. With agriculture’s contribution to the GDP reducing at a fast clip, women’s employment opportunities have been dwindling without a corresponding increase in employment in the service and manufacturing domains. This explains the dramatic fall in female participation in rural areas from 41 per cent in 2001 to 29 per cent in 2011.

On the other hand, a failure in creating work opportunities that are flexible and allow for child care has meant that women employment in urban areas has stagnated at around 20 per cent. The larger consequences are graver for India Inc’s and Bharat’s progress. As per the report, India’s GDP growth can rise by another percentage point, if only we are able to tap into the latent female workforce in the country.