IWWAGE-Institute for What Works to Advance Gender Equality
Policies and Programmes For Women and Girls
Bihar has the lowest female workforce participation rate (FWPR) among all states at 2.8 percent. The decline in FWPR has been shaper in rural areas as compared to urban areas, pushing a large number of women out of the workforce since 2007-08. With the decline in women workforce, there has been a substantial increase in the share of women in regular employment, in line with the national trend, and a significant decline in the share of self-employed, which is greater than the decline observed at the all India level. Women’s self-employment in Bihar is characterised by high incidence of own account work and low share of unpaid work, in contrast with all India figures.
Gig Study: Summary and Recommendations
‘Gig economy’ refers to labour markets characterised by independent contracting which happens through digital platforms. Since 2010, the gig economy has received much popularity and academic attention to study its extraordinary rate of growth and also to comprehend how the gig economy is impacting the participation of people. Available literature suggests that since gig workers do not have any standard employee contract, and also have limited or no access to labour protection/social protection, it exposes them to a number of challenges, such as failing to maintain regular income and facing a poor working environment. Besides, gig workers are unable to unionise and have low bargaining power, which makes them more vulnerable in the long run. While women are increasingly participating in the gig economy, however, new opportunities have been highly gendered. IWWAGE undertook a primary study of women service providers of Urban Company (a leading service platform of India), who are concentrated in the beauty and wellness segment. The overarching objective of the study was to investigate: these workers’ experiences, and the constraints they face, including issues of security, flexibility, labour processes and pay/conditions, and to assess the impact on women’s empowerment and agency. We adopted a threefold approach for doing this. We interviewed workers, who were approached through the platform directly. We interviewed platform managers for evidence. And we also interviewed domain experts, to gain insights into similar forms of platform work.
The Future of Work for Women Workers
World over, the technology-driven gig economy has been expanding rapidly over the past decade, in which digital platforms connect ‘workers’ with ‘requesters’ to facilitate on demand work. While the gig economy has also become a buzzword in India, particularly in the last couple of years, and is attracting millennials by offering alternative employment opportunities. However, literature is scanty when it comes to measuring its impacts on the gendered experiences of gig work or on gig workers.
This report aims to provide a comprehensive analytical overview of women’s engagement in platform work, and presents findings from an in-depth study of women’s work in one of India’s leading platform companies. It aims to understand the emerging forms of labour practices and the impact of platform engagement on workers’ experiences, challenges, and impact on women’s empowerment and agency. The findings are based on interviews with workers, platform managers, and other key informants, and comprehensive literature review. The study presents an in-depth and specialised analysis of the gig economy to explain some of the unique features of the labour practices and consequences of such practices on the overall labour relations. The study also makes specific recommendations and argue that policy makers and platforms have a key role in ensuring access to decent work and social protection for these workers.
Wage employment for women: Forgotten priorities
Low and declining women’s labour force participation rates in India have been a longstanding concern. Government policies for addressing this challenge have mainly emphasised promoting entrepreneurship among women. Designing skill development programmes (DDU-GKY, PMKY and so on) which also aim at building women’s skills to access technology; facilitating access to digital platforms and promoting partnerships with start-ups aimed at providing women with fintech solutions; and facilitating access to credit through extending low-value MUDRA loans have been some of the main interventions. All these programmes primarily aim at making entrepreneurs out of women as a way to achieving greater workforce participation of women – with a lateral objective of enhancing ‘Make in India’ efforts through greater entrepreneurial ventures by women.
But data on entrepreneurship of women in India suggest that there is a long way to go. The economic census, last published in 2013-14, showed that women’s enterprises were only 13.8 percent of total enterprises and 84 percent of these were operating without any hired workers. The average employment per women’s establishment was 1.67 workers indicating low employment creation capacity. Further, 27 percent of all non-agricultural establishments owned by women were operating from home – of which more than 50% were in manufacturing.
The periodic labour force survey (PLFS), 2017-18, shows that 52 percent of women’s workforce is in self-employment, which can be further disaggregated into three sub categories – own account enterprises (OAE), employers and unpaid/contributing family workers. The first two categories capture women’s entrepreneurial ventures best. Almost 32 percent of all women workers are engaged as unpaid helpers in household enterprises and only 19 percent run OAEs. These figures, coupled with micro-evidence from literature, show that the women OAEs remain trapped in low-scale, low-productive, low return ventures such as in rolling bidis and agarbattis, making pickles and papads, or mending clothes with a sewing machine.
But self-employment only captures one half of women’s work. According to the PLFS, 48 percent women are in wage employment. Of these, 21 percent are in regular employment and 27 percent work in casual labour. The impact of increasing wage employment on women’s empowerment is well-established. Still, there is no policy emphasis for this sector.
There are several mechanisms that can be employed to increase women’s wage employment opportunities. For example, the MGNREGA attracts a large number of women, with about 55 percent of total person-days of work created under this legislation accruing to women. There are a number of field reports to suggest that provision of equal wages for men and women, proximity of workplace, assumed safety at workplace and so on, makes MGNREGA a popular option for women. MGNREGA has the potential to attract even more women if all its provisions such as creche facilities, shade and water are also provided adequately. Unfortunately, the trend of provision of work under this scheme has been stagnant and there have been challenges of delayed wage payments.
Outside of agriculture, where the absorption of labour has been declining, women are attracted to jobs in providing public services. The PLFS data show that 29 percent of women working outside agriculture in rural areas are engaged in public employment. Large numbers work as frontline workers, particularly in public health and education. Some cadres such as anganwadi workers and helpers, mid-day meal cooks, ASHA workers, ANMs are exclusively women (estimated to be over 60 lakh). Nearly half of the total teaching workforce in elementary education in India are women. In recent times there has also been an increase of women employed as police constables in many states. But despite these opportunities, women remain concentrated at lower levels of the occupational hierarchy, mostly restricted to what are seen as ‘women’s roles’ (traditionally caregiving occupations). They receive low wages and work in poor conditions.
An agenda of universal provision of basic services such as health, education and social protection can not only contribute towards improving India’s human development indicators but also create millions of new jobs, more so for women. Some state governments have provisions such as reserving posts for women in government jobs. But such measures can have an impact only when there is an expansion in the total number of government jobs. Having said that, there is a need to hire more workers for public services, given the millions of vacancies that exist for these posts as per government norms.
Apart from casual wage work and regular public employment, women’s wage work includes work undertaken in factories, especially in garments, electronics and food-processing which have served as traditional sectors of women’s employment. While great emphasis has been on promoting ‘Make in India’, policies related to incentivising these sectors have been elusive. Recent subsidies announced for the textile sector aimed at generating employment are yet to show results.
Governments can push for multiple policies to create decent wage work opportunities for women, from expanding public works programmes such as the MGNREGA, to adding a cadre of public service para workers, for whom there is a crying need. Such interventions along with a focus on labour intensive manufacturing sectors can not only create employment and demand but also contribute to lifting the Indian economy out of its current economic slowdown.
This opinion piece is written by Dipa Sinha and Sona Mitra. Dipa Sinha teaches Economics at Ambedkar University, Delhi, and Sona Mitra is the Principal Economist at Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy (IWWAGE), an initiative of LEAD at Krea University.
Voices from the Field
With approximately 67 million women mobilised into Self-Help Groups and federations, owned and represented by women, the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM) holds great promise for advancing women’s socio-economic empowerment and offering them resilience in times of crises such as the current pandemic. SHG federations across India not only offer means for many poor women to build sustainable households, but are also platforms for them to seek support, including financial, social and psychological support that they derive by associating themselves with others who are like them.
Stories from the ground during India’s lockdown phase are suggesting that Self Help Groups (SHGs) of women are being involved by state governments in the fight against COVID-19. SHGs across India have worked day and night to manufacture masks, run community kitchens and assist in health checks. They have helped spread awareness about the virus in the local language and in a culturally-sensitive manner within their communities. Yet, SHGs and their members have been impacted both socially and economically, with many reporting intensive losses to their work and livelihoods, increased drudgery and unpaid work burden and rising incidence of domestic violence. In line with IWWAGE’s core mandate of informing the policy agenda on women’s economic empowerment in India, this report presents a summary of insights gained from recent research and conversations around women’s empowerment collectives (WECs) and how women are dealing with the pandemic and lockdown in India. The report attempts to summarise the challenges women and their collectives are facing during the lockdown and concludes with a series of recommendations.
Can Covid-19 provide opportunities to strengthen the SHG movement?
The Self-Help Groups (SHG) movement was introduced in India in the 1980s[1] to alleviate poverty, establish a platform for collective action, ensure access to rights and entitlements, as well as improve the health and wellbeing of women. Initiated by Non-Governmental Organisations[2] (NGOs) the movement was adopted and scaled by the Government of India through the Deendayal Antayodaya Yojana – National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY –NRLM) which has so far mobilised approximately 60 million poor women into SHGs across India.
SHGs are voluntary groups of up to 20 women, that come together on a weekly basis to pool savings and discuss issues of mutual importance. The pooled fund, deposited in the SHG’s bank account is used to support women in the form of loans. SHGs are founded on weekly meetings and savings and their success or failure is partially based on the frequency of these activities. The SHG, however, serves a function that goes well beyond finance; it is a source of collective action, mutual support and comradery. It provides a platform to impart knowledge and wisdom in the form of group discussions and informal conversations that women regularly engage in, thereby strengthening bonding and social capital. SHGs also draw on formal trainings imparted to them by the state and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), to create awareness on various issues such as gender equality, livelihoods, health, gender based violence and so on.
Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy (IWWAGE) has been engaged with DAY-NRLM through its project SWAYAM [3] which supports gender trainings (undertaken by CSOs) and pilots to test the relevance and effectiveness of institutional platforms such as Gender Resource Centres (GRCs)/Gender Justice Centres (GJCs) in four states: Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha. The concept of the GRC draws from the experience of similar platforms in Delhi and Kerala [4] where GRCs have been used to help women access schemes and programmes, as well as record their grievances. SWAYAM builds on a critical element of NRLM’s success i.e. the mission’s commitment towards prioritising women’s perspectives and being responsive to their needs and aspirations. This approach has been embedded across all DAY-NRLM activities and reflects in its primary goal of strengthening women’s agency, identity, well-being, and solidarity through women’s collectivisation.
This approach and the ability of women to meet to discuss their needs and put forth their requirements, is likely to be put to test on account of COVID-19. SHG meetings have traditionally formed a space for women to gather mutual support and raise their grievances. They serve as an important platform for women to share their lives and aggregate for a common cause. They have been the fulcrum around which well-known movements such as the anti-arak (alcohol) movement in Andhra Pradesh have gathered force; and around which the Scheduled Caste women in states like Punjab are mobilising to collectively farm common lands. Such mobilisation will suffer if women are not permitted to meet.
The lockdown announced in March 2020, to curb the spread of the Coronavirus in India has sent shockwaves across the Indian economy. Rural economies are in distress, with supply chains cut off, labour shortages and rising unemployment [5]. The lockdown has had immediate and devastating effects on women and girls [6]. Gender based violence is reportedly on the rise. Women’s unpaid labour has increased along with the anxiety to feed their families. Cash flow is limited and with prevailing social distancing norms, collectivisation has come to a total halt. All regular meetings and activities at the SHG, VO and CLF have stopped, for an indeterminate period of time [7]. Women not being able to move out of their homes (except for farm work), have lost spaces outside the home, such as SHG meetings, where they could come together and share intimate details of their private lives, including domestic abuse. With this space being closed, women have lost the space to share their experiences and have a community of support. This has and will continue to have large scale impact on the SHG movement.
IWWAGE has been in discussion with CSO partners [8], field level functionaries and SHG leaders in its four implementation states on the impact of the pandemic and the ensuing lockdown on SHGs, their daily functioning and their economic and non-economic activities. How will women’s SHGs transform during and post the crisis? And what impact will the crisis have on women’s solidarity and collectivisation?
Presently, no SHG activities are taking place. There are no meetings, no savings, no loan disbursement [9] or recovery. In June, rural India will enter a new sowing cycle. Women will most likely, at this time, prioritise their livelihoods which will affect attendance and frequency of SHG activities. They will have no time to meet, to discuss their needs or grievances. This is an important aspect that is likely to get diluted, but can be avoided, perhaps through innovative forms of online communication, and more hand-holding and outreach to women through gender champions including senior SHG leaders, community resource persons, Samta Sakhis and the like. For certain activities, SHGs have started using digital modes of communication such as WhatsApp. Use of digital tools while changing the nature of SHG meetings will allow the flow of correct information. However, online communication cannot be a substitute for the weekly SHG meetings, which should continue, with social distancing norms in place, as they are not only a platform for savings but also for ensuring collective well-being, food security and support.
SHGs have emerged as frontline workers and the last mile connect between governments and the people during this crisis. SHG women are playing a pivotal role in responding to COVID-19; they are making masks, hand sanitizers, PPE kits, distributing take home ration, disseminating COVID-19 related information and running community kitchens to feed the vulnerable[10]. The role of SHGs has never been more important than now and can prove to be a rare silver lining in the distress that SHGs are dealing with. Women can come forward and take leadership and development roles in their villages. It is an opportunity that the SHG movement must capitalize on.
Going forward, it will be important to strengthen the movement, to make sure it can absorb the economic, social and health shocks of the crisis. Post the lockdown governments should evaluate, the investment by SHG movement into COVID-19 response and its impact on the SHG economy. It would also be beneficial to have clear guidelines from the authorities, about when and how SHGs can reconvene and what precautions they must take while doing so. SHGs should also leverage digital platforms, to ensure the flow of correct information, to keep in contact with each other and with the modification of training pedagogies, to deliver certain types of trainings. While the digital platforms cannot be a substitute for weekly meetings, it goes some way in offering a temporary solution to the immediate problem. In these times when communication through technology marks a new form of solidarity, we must leverage the existing means at our disposal and find new and creative ways to progress; so that we do not lose the momentum gained in the SHG movement over the last 30 years.
Kaliat Ammu Sanyal is a Research Manager with IWWAGE, working with SWAYAM the NRLM vertical at IWWAGE. This piece draws from SWAYAM’s current work with Women’s Empowerment Collectives on gender mainstreaming across four states in India.
[1] “Self Help Groups (SHGs) in India.” 2014. New Delhi: Ethiopian Delegation
[2] Ramesh, Jairam. “Self-Help Groups Revolution: What Next?” Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 36 (2007): 3621-624. Accessed May 13, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40276360
[3] Strengthening Women’s institutions for Agency and Empowerment (SWAYAM)
[4] “Kudumbashree | Gender Resource Center / Block Level Counselling Center”. 2020. Kudumbashree.Org. http://www.kudumbashree.org/pages/348. AND “Department Of Women & Child Development”. 2020 Revenue.Delhi.Gov.In http://revenue.delhi.gov.in/wps/wcm/connect/doit_wcd/wcd/Home/Gender+Resource+Centre+Project
[5] Mukherjee, Sanjeeb. 2020. “Rural Sector Stressed As Covid-19 Disrupts Supplies, Spikes Unemployment”. Business-Standard.Com. https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/rural-sector-stressed-as-covid-19-disrupts-supplies-spikes-unemployment-120032500780_1.html
[6] Deshpande, Ashwini. “Protecting Women Is Missing from Pandemic Management Measures in India.” Quartz India. Quartz, March 28, 2020. https://qz.com/india/1826683/indias-approach-to-fighting-coronavirus-lacks-a-gender-lens/
[7] SHGs are federated at the village level into Village Organisations (VOs) and consequently federated into a apex institution, a Cluster Level Federation (CLF). The VO and CLF meet regularly. The executive committee (EC) of the VO and CLF meet twice a month. EC1 meetings are to discuss social issues, convergence, rights and entitlements, while EC2 meetings are devoted to financial transactions
[8] ANANDI in Madhya Pradesh, PRADAN in Jharkhand, Chaitanya in Chhattisgarh and Project Concern International (PCI) in Odisha
[9] The only loan disbursement currently active is the distribution of the Vulnerability Reduction Fund (VRF)
[10] Kejriwal, Nita. “Covid-19: In Times of Crisis, Women Self-Help Groups Lead the Way.” Hindustan Times, May 3, 2020. https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/covid-19-in-times-of-crisis-women-self-help-groups-lead-the-way/story-SyXJVNPLUdVbSljkeaeszN.html
Impact of COVID 19 on Working Women
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