Why India's Laxmi Deserves More Shakti Through Equal Skill Training and Job Opportunities

A recent report by consulting group McKinsey Global has highlighted the immense economic potential India is failing to realise, all because women face work-related hindrances.

India can potentially add $770 billion to its GDP in the upcoming years just by boosting the share of women in the country’s economy.

With one of the lowest rates of women workforce participation in the world, India is a difficult country for working women. Women’s contribution is a grim 18%. This, despite India’s working population standing at a massive 136.13 crore, of which, 48.65% are women.

The World Bank data paints an even bad picture in this regard. Over the past decade, the number of active women workers in the economy dipped from 26% to 19%.

This means that three of every four Indian women are excluded from any and every recognised economic activity. Recently, in his I-Day speech, PM Narendra Modi exhorted the importance of Nari Shakti as an important pillar of growth in fulfilling India’s vision of becoming a developed economy by 2047.

But numbers suggest that we are nowhere near it. India ranks 136th among 145 countries in the 2022 Global Gender Gap Report. Part of this is attributable to the disproportionate time women are socially forced to commit to domestic work.

As per the Time Use Survey Report 2019, women in India spend only 61 minutes per day on employment and related activities, as opposed to 247 minutes spent on unpaid domestic services. On the other hand, men spend 263 minutes working and only 76 minutes per day taking care of family.

According to the 2018-19 Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), the worker population ratio (WPR) for women in rural areas was 19.0, and just 14.5 in urban areas. Contrast this with the WPR for men in rural India, which is 52.1 and 52.7 urbanely, and the difference is extremely hard to ignore.

In order to bridge this skill and workforce divide, India’s Laxmis need targeted skill development policies. According to 2019-2020 PLFS, only 2.9% of women aged 15-59 across India received any kind of formal vocational and technical training, compared to 3.5% men.

Naturally, better skill sets mean better-earning prospects.

Divya Sahasrabuddhe, a Gurgaon-based IT professional, said, “Apart from providing training in English and Hindi, we must introduce vocational studies in local languages too. In general, sophisticated occupational choices for women are still limited to cosmetology, fashion design, or interior design. In urban India, more women should step into IT and other male-dominated spaces”.

The difference is starker in rural areas, where only 1.7% of women received training as opposed to 2.2% rural Indian men. But urban India presents no better picture with women lagging at 5.4% and men pushing forward with vocational training at 6.3%.

Women also find it very tough to find credit for their entrepreneurial ventures. Only 2% of all start-up funding is allocated to women. Rupali Karjgir, a self-employed dietician, nutritionist and entrepreneur, explains, “A lot of problems, both social and financial, emerge for first-generation women entrepreneurs. There is a dire need to train every woman entrepreneur in basic skills, so they have all the necessary resources to skyrocket their dreams.”

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