Mentor’s Comment
With India’s youth unemployment already double its 2012 rate and GDP growth slower than official figures suggest, critics argue that India cannot sustain rapid growth or reach Viksit Bharat by 2047 while excluding half its population, women, from productive work.
Why does raising female work participation matter for growth itself, not just for equity?
- Direct growth arithmetic: A 10 percentage point rise in India’s female Work Participation Rate (WPR) could add nearly two percentage points to GDP growth.
- Labour supply channel: More women in paid work expands the economy’s productive capacity and raises household incomes, consumption, and savings.
- Human capital channel: Higher household incomes from women’s earnings improve children’s nutrition, education, and healthcare, strengthening long term human capital.
- Productivity channel: Citing Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin, gender diverse workplaces are more efficient, creative, and competitive, making women’s inclusion a productivity strategy, not only a welfare measure.
What explains the decline and stagnation in women’s work participation since the 1980s?
- Structural shift away from farming: As structural transformation reduced agriculture’s role between 2004-05 and 2012, mechanisation and falling demand for manual labour pushed rural women out of the workforce.
- The COVID reversal was distress, not choice: Post-2020 gains in women’s participation followed a GDP slowdown since 2017; return migration from cities pushed women into unpaid family labour in subsistence agriculture, a “distress driven feminisation of agriculture.”
- Capital intensive growth excludes women: India’s recent GDP growth has concentrated in capital intensive sectors like finance and information technology, which absorb few workers, while labour intensive sectors such as textiles and garments saw absolute employment fall between 2013 and 2019.
- Manufacturing’s broken promise: Fewer women were employed in manufacturing in 2019 than in 2004, despite Make in India and Performance-Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes; women’s manufacturing employment did not recover to 2004 levels until 2022.
Why does Tamil Nadu succeed where most of India does not?
- Tamil Nadu’s outsized concentration: More than 40% of India’s women factory workers are employed in Tamil Nadu, a state with only 5% to 6% of India’s population.
- Sectoral base: This concentration rests on strong textile and garment hubs in Tiruppur and Coimbatore, footwear, electronics assembly in Sriperumbudur, and automobile components.
- Enabling conditions: Higher female literacy, greater mobility, and well developed hostel and transport facilities for women workers underpin the sector’s ability to employ women at scale.
- The Hindi belt contrast: States there need investment in health (not merely insurance) and public education for girls and women to bring down malnutrition and stunting before they can replicate Tamil Nadu’s outcomes.
Conclusion
India’s growth story is incomplete without raising female work participation, and the deficit is concentrated in exactly the sectors, labour intensive manufacturing, that once absorbed women workers and have since collapsed for them. Closing the north-south divide by replicating Tamil Nadu’s combination of sectoral investment, education, and mobility infrastructure is presented as the precondition for India to be “Viksit” by 2047.
Back2Basics
- Work Participation Rate (WPR): The proportion of the population that is economically active (working or seeking work); distinct from the unemployment rate, which measures only those seeking work among the labour force.
- U-shaped curve (Claudia Goldin): The empirical pattern where female labour force participation first falls as an economy industrialises and household incomes rise, then rises again as education and the services sector expand, a pattern India’s data through 2018-19 is shown to follow.
Question (2014): Discuss the various economic and socio-cultural forces that are driving increasing feminization of agriculture in India.