So in 2019, Bhunia left her isolated village in eastern India. He took a train hundreds of miles south to the city of Bangalore and found work in a garment factory, earning $120 a month. The job freed him. “I ran away,” she said. “That’s the only way I was able to go.”
That life of economic freedom came to an abrupt end with the advent of COVID-19. In 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown to contain infections, closing almost all businesses. Within a few weeks, more than 10 crore Indians lost their jobs, including the Bhunias, who were forced to return to their villages and found no other stable employers.
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As the world emerges out of the pandemic, economists warn of a troubling data point: Failing to restore jobs for women – who are less likely than men in the workforce – could cost trillions of dollars from global economic growth. can earn. The forecast is particularly bleak in developing countries such as India, where female labor force participation has fallen so sharply that it is now in the same league as war-torn Yemen.
This week’s episode of The Pay Check podcast reveals how the coronavirus has accelerated an already worrying trend in the world’s second most populous country. According to data compiled by the World Bank, between 2010 and 2020, the number of working women in India fell from 26% to 19%. As infections escalated, a worse situation worsened: Economists in Mumbai estimate female employment to fall by 9% by 2022.
This is devastating news for India’s economy, which had slowed down before the pandemic. Modi has given priority to job creation, pressurized the country to strive for the golden age of development, Amrit Kaal. But his administration has made little progress in improving the prospects of working women. This is especially true in rural areas, where more than two-thirds of India’s 1.3 billion people live, conservative customs rule and jobs that have been disappearing over the years. Despite the country’s rapid economic expansion, women have struggled to make the transition to work in urban centres.
Closing the employment gap between men and women – by 58 percentage points – could expand India’s GDP to close to a third by 2050. According to a recent analysis by Bloomberg Economics, this equates to about $6 trillion in constant US dollar terms. Doing nothing threatens to derail the country in its quest to become a competitive producer for global markets. Although women represent 48% of the population in India, they contribute only 17% to GDP compared to 40% in China.
India is an extreme example of a global phenomenon. Worldwide, women were more likely than men to lose jobs during the pandemic, and their recovery has been slow. According to Bloomberg Economics, policy changes that address gender inequalities and promote the number of working women – better access to education, child care, or flexible work arrangements – will add about $20 trillion to global GDP by 2050. will help.
For workers like 23-year-old Bhunia, the pandemic had huge consequences. After losing her job, she struggled to afford food in Bengaluru and eventually returned to her remote village, Patrapali, in the state of Odisha. Bhunia doesn’t think he will have another chance to go. She no longer earns a steady income, but her family is concerned about her safety as a lonely woman living in a distant city.
Bhunia said, “If I run away again, my mother will curse me. Now, there is nothing left. My account is empty and there is very little work in the village.”
The story resonates across India. During the pandemic, Rosa Abrahams, professor of economics at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, tracked more than 20,000 people as they navigated the labor market. It found that after the first lockdown, women were many times more likely than men to lose their jobs and much less likely to recover after the restrictions were lifted.
Increased domestic duties, a lack of childcare options after school closures, and an increase in marriages – which often limit women’s autonomy in India – help explain the difference in outcomes.
Abraham said, “When men face such a huge economic shock, they have a fallback option. They can navigate different types of jobs. But there is no such fallback option for women.” They cannot interact effectively in the labor market like men.”
Dreams of independence or a well-paying office job were replaced with “crisis-led employment”, essentially unpaid work on a family farm or looking after the household. Before the pandemic, Indian women had already performed nearly 10 times higher. Care work compared to men, nearly three times the global average.
“It is an unfortunate situation that the decision to act is often not in the hands of the woman herself,” Abraham said.
The decline in workforce participation is partly about culture. As Indians became richer, families that could afford to keep women at home assumed social status, thinking that. On the other hand, those at the lowest rung of society are still seen as potential earners. But they tend to stay away from the formal economy or work in unpaid jobs. Their labor is not counted in the official figures.
Patriarchal values still persist in many villages and there is a stigma against girls. Although illegal, sex-selective abortions are still common. Akhina Hansraj, senior program manager at Akshara Center, a Mumbai-based organization advocating for gender equality, said Indian men often think “it’s not very manly if their wife contributes to the family’s income.”
Hansraj said, “They want to create this dependency. People believe that if women become educated, they can work and become financially independent and then they can take care of the family and Can’t respect that.”
Marriage is an important point in India, where most marriages are still arranged. After the first lockdown, in 2020, the country’s leading matrimony websites reported an increase in new registrations. In some states, marriages between children and young adults – many of which are illegal under Indian law – rose by as much as 80%, according to government figures.
Madhu Sharma, a Hindi teacher at Pardada Pardadi Educational Society, a girls’ school in the northern city of Anupshahr, said she could intervene in three child marriages in a year. During the pandemic, when the campus was closed, the number increased three to four times.
He said, “Before Covid, children were always in touch with their teachers and also with me.” “Post-Covid, when children had to stay at home, it became a big challenge to keep in touch with them.”
Financial considerations often tipped the scales in favor of marriage. Social distancing and warnings against large gatherings mean that parents can organize smaller, less expensive celebrations at home, rather than the multi-day celebrations that are common even in the poorest of society. During the most difficult times of the pandemic, some families married off daughters because they could not nurture another mouth.
For Sharma’s students, getting married before finishing school could change the course of their lives. In India, when a woman marries, she usually lives with her husband and in-laws. This can make it difficult to leave secluded villages where election policing is common and employment opportunities are scarce.
Sharma said, “We try to educate our students. We make them understand that if they study, they will be in a good place. If they don’t, we tell how their situation will be. ‘Baaki ki baat hai aapko,’ we tell them. You live life the way you want to make it.”
In 2015, Modi launched a campaign called “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao”, which roughly means “Save our daughters, educate our daughters.” It is an initiative aimed at keeping girls in school and reducing gender-selective abortion. The government is also making efforts to end child marriage. Last year, Modi’s administration passed a resolution to raise the legal marriage age for women from 18 to 21, which is for men.
But in many villages, national laws are a far cry. Local customs are still determined and enforced by local panchayats, essentially a group of elders, almost all men. And while Modi’s campaign to educate India’s daughters received a lot of publicity, a recent government audit found that much of the money for the initiative went unspent.
Even in urban metropolises, where literacy rates are higher and jobs are more abundant, the pressure on women is enormous.
Anjali Gupta, who lives in Mumbai, said that she was barely hanging on. First, the coronavirus lockdown ravaged her family’s small grocery store, forcing them to exhaust their savings to survive. Then her parents started pushing Gupta and her three sisters into marriage, fearing that they would be left destitute without a husband.
Gupta tried to reason with them. She had already spent about $1,300 to study for a master’s degree in pharmaceuticals and nutrition. She was taking training from a homeopathic doctor. She wanted a career. “I explained that my situation is different, my generation is different,” Gupta said.
But after the death of an uncle from coronavirus, Gupta’s father pleaded with him to drop out of school, a prospect that prompted migraines and endless arguments. His parents began to bring home the future grooms. Gupta worries that inertia will eventually take hold of him.
“It shouldn’t be like that,” she said. “I want to do and learn more. I’m only 22.”
This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed.