A growth story that needs women at work, Pg6

Key Highlights:

• India aims to become a developed country, Viksit Bharat, by 2047, but faces challenges like youth unemployment and low female work participation.
• India's female Work Participation Rate (WPR) is below 30%, among the lowest globally, comparable to West Asian countries.
• A 10-percentage-point increase in India’s female WPR could add nearly two percentage points to GDP growth.
• Policy-induced shocks since 2016, including demonetisation and a poorly designed Goods and Services Tax (GST), reversed structural changes and slowed non-farm job growth.
• Tamil Nadu demonstrates a successful model, employing over 40% of India's women factory workers due to its strong manufacturing base and supportive infrastructure.

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Detailed Insights:

• The article highlights that India's economic growth has been slower than official figures suggest, partly due to policy-induced shocks.
• The decline in female WPR between 1983 and 2018 was initially due to a shift away from agriculture and later exacerbated by a lack of non-farm job opportunities.
• Post-2020, an increase in female WPR was largely "distress-driven feminisation of agriculture," with women engaging in subsistence farming as Unpaid Family Labour (UFL) due to economic distress and male job losses during COVID-19.
• India's economic growth has been concentrated in capital-intensive sectors like finance and IT, which do not create large numbers of jobs, especially for women.
• Labour-intensive sectors such as textiles and garments saw a fall in women's employment between 2013 and 2019, despite initiatives like Make in India.
• Educated young women in India face high and rising unemployment rates, with over 100 million young women (15-29 years) neither working nor in education by 2018.
• The success of states like Tamil Nadu in female employment is attributed to investments in education, mobility, and labor-intensive industries like textiles and electronics.

Key Concepts Involved:

• Viksit Bharat: India's vision to become a developed nation by 2047, coinciding with 100 years of independence.
• Work Participation Rate (WPR): The percentage of the population that is employed or actively seeking employment.
• Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR): The percentage of the working-age population that is either employed or unemployed but looking for work.
• Unpaid Family Labour (UFL): Work performed by individuals within a family enterprise without receiving a direct wage or salary.
• Demonetisation: The act of stripping a currency unit of its status as legal tender, as seen in India in 2016.
• Goods and Services Tax (GST): An indirect tax used in India on the supply of goods and services, implemented in 2017.