Female Labour Force

Is the Rise in Female Work Participation due to an Odd Set of Instructions to Enumerators?

Given the high degree of informality in the Indian economy, national employment surveys have drawn up complex instructions to capture all those who work. This however also comes with the risk that…
▶10-Feb-2025
Aloke Kar, PC Mohanan
Book
Behind the Rise in Women’s Work-II

The Rise in Female Labour and Work Force Participation Rates

The increasing participation of women in work in recent years as revealed by official surveys, especially in 2023-24, appears to arise from definitional changes that now include groups of women as…
▶16-Jan-2025
Avanindra Nath Thakur, Priyanshi Chaudhary
Book
Behind the Rise in Women’s Work-I

What Does Self-Employment Mean for Women in India?

Contrary to official claims that we have “an equitable, vibrant labour market where women play a leading role”, there has been a decline in real incomes of self-employed women and falling real wages…
▶14-Jan-2025
Jayati Ghosh

The Productivity Debate and Women’s Work: Careers or Family Care?

Educated women leaving the workforce hurts India’s growth. But child & family care options are lacking in the work structures we now have. We need “bridge” jobs, like part-time work, to help…
▶23-Apr-2024
Mala Khullar, Ratna M Sudarshan

Making Sense of Recent Developments in the Indian Labour Market

The PLFS for 2022-23 reports the highest workforce participation rate and the lowest unemployment rate in the last six years. This has been the result of the entry of an increasing number of women…
▶17-Oct-2023
Akshit Arora

Growth, Structural Change, and Opportunities: Who has Benefited?

While the connection between GDP and job growth in India has been poor, there has been a rapid increase of women in the modern services; while there has been greater job mobility, this has been very…
▶20-Sep-2023
Amit Basole, Akshit Arora, M. K. Shravan

What Do We Miss on Women’s Employment in Survey Data?

Women’s participation in work turns out to be much higher than usually estimated when modifications are made to the questions asked in surveys, the time period covered and, most important, who is…
▶21-Feb-2023
Rosa Abraham, Nishat Anjum, Rahul Lahoti, Hema Swaminathan

Reconceptualising Women’s Work in the the National Sample Survey

A good approach to build a new framework for measuring women’s work better is for the National Statistical Office to accept the definitions and categories recommended in 2013 by the 19th…
▶04-Aug-2022
Santosh Mehrotra

How Dynamic are India’s Labour Markets?

While policy works to provide more jobs to the unemployed, it must also tackle the deep-seated structural issues in India's urban labour market: long-term unemployment; women exiting the labour…
▶07-Jun-2022
Rahul Menon, Paaritosh Nath
Explainer

Understanding India's Jobs Challenge

Unemployment today is at an all-time high but that is not the only challenge in jobs: more and more workers are withdrawing from the labour force, the wages of casual workers are below a reasonable…
▶26-Aug-2019
Radhicka Kapoor