Date: 14/09/2022

Relevance: GS-2: Issues relating to the development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, and Human Resources.

Key Phrases: NSS Survey, Increased Diet Diversity, Improved Health Indicators For Women, Welfare-Enhancing Expenditures, Women's Economic Participation And Political Empowerment, Gender Sensitisation And Social Change,

Why in News?

• An article ‘More women in the workforce means better security based on NSS survey data has shown that more women in the paid workforce mean better food security.
• It is argued that income in the hands of women, independent of men’s income, leads to increased diet diversity and improved health indicators for women.

Key Highlights:

• Income empowers women to give preference to more welfare-enhancing expenditures for themselves and their children.
• Although women’s unpaid work can also lead to diet diversity, it does not have the same impact as women paid for their work who are better able to exercise their preferences.
• Given the high level of undernutrition among women and children and high infant mortality in India, understanding the pathways to reduce both is important.

What is the status of female labour force participation in India?

• Although a section of women in India has attained stellar accomplishments shattering all kinds of glass ceilings, the majority of Indian women are continually falling off the workforce, or not managing to enter it at all.
• India has witnessed a steady decline in the labour force participation rate (LFPR) for women.
• World Bank data estimates that India's female LFPR fell from over 26 per cent in 2005 to 20.3 per cent in 2019.
• The corresponding figure that year was 30.5 per cent in Bangladesh and 33.7 per cent in Sri Lanka.
• The Covid-19 pandemic has made the situation even worse.
• The Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) says that in 2019-20, India's female LFPR was less than 11 per cent, compared to 71 per cent for men.
• The urban women fared worse than their rural women where the LFPR was 9.7 per cent among urban women, as against 11.3 per cent among rural women.

How has India performed in comparison to the other Asian countries on the scale of female LFPR?

• India has one of the lowest levels of the female labour force in paid employment in the world.
• India’s record contrasts with other developing countries in Asia where the levels of female paid employment are higher and steadier and, in some cases, increasing sharply, most notably in Bangladesh.
• A sectoral breakdown of employment shows that India’s paid female employment in the agricultural sector has declined whereas it has increased in other countries — for example, in China and Bangladesh.
• Most striking is the increased employment in the manufacturing sector in Bangladesh, whereas the share remained stable or declined in other countries.
• The share of female employment also increased in the services sector steadily in other countries, but once again, it increased most dramatically in Bangladesh.
• Therefore, the argument often made in India that the low and declining female employment is a result of social norms and the lack of appropriate job opportunities in the vicinity of where women live is not very convincing.
• Other Asian countries with similar social norms have been able to overcome them by increased investment in education and health of women.

Why has there been such a steep slide in the participation of women in India's labour force?

• In most countries, female LFPR has typically followed a U-shaped trajectory.
• With economic growth and rising incomes, women initially tend to quit work as they no longer feel the need to earn money to add to the household income.
• But as growth leads to social development, such as declining fertility rates and the spread of education among girls, women come back into the workforce.
• However, this has not happened in India.
• Women have continued to drop off from the job market despite a fall in the fertility rate and advancements in female education. This can be attributed to the lack of enough job creation.
• India's manufacturing sector has not been able to produce enough labour-intensive jobs that could have been taken up by women, the way Bangladesh's garment industry has done.
• The result is that the available jobs pool is disproportionately appropriated by male workers, whose need for paid work is traditionally considered much more urgent than that of women.

Reasons for Low female labour force participation:

• Lack of safe and secure working environment: The long-term challenge in India is to increase opportunities for women to work outside the home in decent and productive employment, as well as increase investment in education, health, and training to create more opportunities for women to be employed productively.
• Low Public spending on the social sector: India currently underperforms relative to comparable developing countries in terms of public spending as well as outcomes. Also, out-of-pocket spending by households on health and education is high in India and a leading cause of indebtedness.
• Poorly trained and poorly incentivised staff: For example, India established 1.2 million Child Development Centres (Anganwadis) in 1972 but they are underfunded and staffed with poorly trained and poorly incentivised staff.
• Burden of caregiving work: Even today, women are expected to shoulder the bulk of household duties and care-giving, which severely limits their ability to participate in paid work.
• Patriarchal norms in families and workplace: Cultural and social norms prevent women from realising their full economic potential, and safety concerns restrict their physical and economic mobility. Additionally, gender inequities and the lack of enabling conditions in the workplace make it more difficult for women to actively participate in the labour market.

Way Forward:

1. Support services for women: For real inclusion to take place, policy measures must focus not just on skilling and job creation, but also on support services for women who are willing to work. Opportunities for work that is proximate, child care facilities, safe transportation, removing gender gap in pay, and so on, could all motivate women to loosen the grip of family and join the job market
2. Gender sensitisation and social change: Sustained interventions must be made to uproot deep-seated patriarchal notions that regard women as inferior creatures whose primary role in life is to lay themselves down in the service of husband and family.
3. Increased investment in social sector: There are increased demands for increasing the health budget from around 1 percent to 3 percent of India’s GDP, and the education budget from 4 percent to 6 percent of GDP. This will create decent jobs and improve the quality of growth.

Conclusion:

• For countless Indian women, a complex web of social, economic and familial factors makes paid work itself a distant dream.
• Women play a crucial role in the production of food and in feeding their families and the world and gender equality are highly connected to food security at a local, national, and global level.
• Thus, women’s labour force participation and access to decent work are important and necessary elements of an inclusive and sustainable development process.
• A policy framework encouraging and enabling women’s participation should be constructed with an active awareness of the “gender-specific” constraints that face most women.

Source: The Hindu BL

Mains Question:

Q. What is the status of female labour force participation in India? How has India performed in comparison to the other Asian countries on the scale of female LFPR? Examine the reasons for low female LFPR as well as suggest measures for an inclusive and sustainable growth of women. (250 words).