Women and work: Examining India’s policy landscape

The Indian
government has actively pursued policies to increase the female labour/workforce
participation (FLWP) rate in the country for several decades. Their approach
has evolved from educational scholarships, reservations, and quotas, to
self-employment through self-help groups (SHGs), and more recently to capacity
building through skill training programmes.

Yet FLWP has been
on a downward trend. Labour bureau data shows that FLWP fell by seven million
between 2013 and 2015, and as per the latest NSSO PLFS survey 2017-2018, only
17.5% of women are part of the labour force, compared to 55.5% of men.

In our study — Female
Work and Labour Force Participation in India — to understand the current policy
landscape, a database of 53 legislations and policies was created, through a
review of the 2018-2019 budget and government repositories. It documents the
policies’ gender focus, targeting strategies, inclusion mechanisms, eligibility
criteria, and geographic focus, among other indicators. The database also
registers whether the following programme components were present or absent in
each policy.

While the success
of female entrepreneurship programmes and the SHG movement have helped
policymakers recognise the potential that women have to further India’s
economic growth, women-oriented policies need more thought.

Is financial
assistance enough?

Whether in the
form of stipends, cash transfers, fee waivers, or scholarships —financial
support seems to be the most commonly occurring programme component. And there
are almost 25 such government run programmes.

Despite the
widespread acknowledgement of the need to ease the burden of the care economy
on women, relatively fewer schemes tackle the social and familial barriers that
prevent women from participating in the labour force. There is a lack of public
safety, workplace security initiatives, and safe transportation; not only are
these unavailable in standalone schemes, they are barely present as policy
components within existing capacity building and livelihoods initiatives. Other
pivotal factors, like childcare facilities within skilling initiatives (important
for young mothers interested in these programmes) are also seen to be missing
from most initiatives.

Further, while
these skilling courses necessitate counselling of some form, career guidance
and mentor-ship support are a rarity. In contrast, empirical work in this area
has found strong evidence to suggest that labour market information,
mentor-ship, peer-effects and improving women’s self-efficacy are significant
channels to improve labour participation.

Evaluations of
skilling programs have found post-placement retention for women to be worse
than men. ‘Personal’ challenges are often cited as the reason to discontinue
work by these women. There is a dire need to effectively operationalise
counselling provisions within these schemes, and ensure that women are able to
access them during, before, and after the programme. Evidence from other
countries shows that there is substantial uptake of skilling initiatives when
women are offered the course within their village. Similarly, research from
India, has shown that in the effort to minimize risk of harassment in transit,
women often make qualitative compromises in their educational choices.

Are the
policies designed to be inclusive?

Given that
various factors intersect to form a person’s identity, and that social or
economic factors can further accentuate the burdens imposed by gender, policies
must recognise that some women are more prone to exclusion than others, and need to work to counter this. A significant number
of schemes ‘encourage’ inclusivity as a policy mandate, without actively
designing for this.

Only 10 policies
were found to have inclusion criteria such as minority status, drop out status,
and disability status, among others. Generally, policies are more likely to
have exclusion criteria such as academic qualification or age limit.

Blanket
allocations without a thorough road map that recognises the contextual
realities of marginalised women are likely to yield suboptimal results. For
example, Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) offers post-placement
support of Rs 1,450 per month for special groups (comprising women, persons
with disabilities, and candidates in special areas). However, by lumping them
together into ‘special groups’, this policy feature does not factor in the
widely different needs of the people within these groups.

What
implications does a focus on quantifiable outcomes have?

Barring a few
programmes like the National Creche Scheme, it is evident that current policy
prioritisation is motivated more by quantifiable outcomes, such as placements
and skill certification. Yet skill improvement does not necessarily lead to
higher participation or even higher wages. For instance, when women in a
garment factory in Bangalore were given on-the-job skills training, their
productivity increased and net returns of the firm rose by 258%, however there
was little impact on their wage levels as a result of (downward)
wage-adjustments by the firm.

The inordinate
focus on quantifiable outcomes often proves to be counter intuitive, and likely to
perpetuate exclusion. Consider, for instance, the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen
Kaushalya Yojana (DDU-GKY). In order to recover the full cost of training,
skilling agencies are required to ensure a 70% placement target. This means
that the programme is more likely to be biased to select those candidates who
are already pre-disposed to being placed; in other words, those who are more
employable all along. Because of the scheme’s compliance mandate, those who
could benefit most from the programme might be excluded.

This is why,
there is growing evidence to suggest that vocational training needs to be part
of an amalgam of several policy components for the training to have an impact
on employability. In almost all the successful cases, training was accompanied
by recruitment services, literacy camps, adult education and more.

Better
policy design is the need of the hour

Despite the gamut
of labour market policies operating in India at a national and state level,
policy research on female labour-force participation is constrained by the
unavailability of national statistics and policy evaluations at an outcome and
impact level. This, in turn, adversely affects policy design which loses its
focus on inclusive outcomes and instead focuses on achieving target number of
beneficiaries or services.

The practice of
quantitative and qualitative impact evaluations must be institutionalised.
Government-commissioned assessments have been sporadic and conducted using
incomparable methodologies and frameworks. For example, currently some labour
market schemes are not independently evaluated even if they do have budgetary
provisions for them (eg. PMKVY and DDU GKY), others may not have budgetary
provisions (eg. Rajiv Gandhi Crèche Scheme), and still others may not be
published online even when evaluated (eg. NSDC STAR Scheme).

Defining the
right metrics which help understand the various dimensions of female workforce
participation, measuring them regularly as part of national databases and
impact evaluations and publishing them transparently in order to constructively
feedback into policy is necessary if India is to achieve gender parity in the
workforce.

This interactive
policy dashboard deconstructs gender and employment related policies, and
identifies gaps and opportunities which can be leveraged to increase the
workforce participation of women in India.

Footnotes

At the most, two
months for men, and three months for women.

Dona is a
consultant at Sattva where she is involved in developing innovative, scalable
and sustainable solutions for EqualEconomy – an initiative aimed at improving
the workforce participation of women in India.

Sneha Menon is
co-founder and researcher at InsightsApplied. Her work spans gender, labour,
social policy and governance. She has a background in economics and math. She
currently works as an economist in West Africa.

This article was originally published on India Development Review and can be viewed here.

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