Seldom in the past has the country's labour market gone through structural changes faster than it has in recent years. Apart from a sharp decline in the proportion of workers employed in agriculture, the perceptible withdrawal of women from the workforce is the most striking feature of India's labour market. Going by the numbers the census and the National Sample Survey Office have thrown up, the share of agriculture in the employment of casual workers dipped by 8.6 percentage points to 64 per cent between 2004-05 and 2011-12. At the same time, the participation of women in the labour market has shrunk by seven percentage points to just 22.5 per cent. Moreover, these changes have occurred as rural wages have increased the most across all categories of workers.
Clearly, the movement of casual labour away from agriculture could not have taken place in the absence of greater job opportunities in the non-farm sectors, which is a healthy trend. The available data, unsurprisingly, point to an increase of nearly six percentage points in labour employment in the construction sector during this period. The services sector, which has also undergone rapid expansion, comes a distant second - which is understandable, given the sector's skill-intensive nature. Better rural roads and improved transportation also seem to have played a role in modifying the labour scene by enhancing labour mobility. The reduced presence of women in the Indian labour market may, on the other hand, be attributable to several other economic and social factors. The rise in income levels, which invariably leads to a decline in distress-driven employment of women, could be a key factor. Caste seems another cause; several studies indicate a relatively low participation of women belonging to upper castes in the casual labour market. Moreover, the construction sector, in which new jobs are mostly being generated, is far from being an attractive alternative for most women. Apart from this, higher enrolment in educational institutions, as has been gradually happening, tends to take girls and women away from farms and other kinds of work and towards schools and colleges. That said, the truth remains that in the farm sector women are still a workforce to reckon with, given that operations like rice transplanting, weed removal and animal husbandry are performed to a large extent by them.
Thus, though the declining dependence on agriculture as the main employer is welcome, the shrinking participation of women in the labour market cannot be viewed as an unmixed blessing. True, it reflects increased prosperity. But, for further development, more female participation is essential. At 22.5 per cent, the rate of women employment in India is far too low. A recent World Bank study ranked India 10th from the bottom in terms of female labour participation. It is essential to create an environment where more women opt to come out for work and contribute to economic development. At the same time, however, the trend of generating more jobs in the non-farm sector needs to be sustained in order to reduce agriculture's burden of supporting the bulk of the country's population.
