female education

Budget 2021: No Lessons Learnt From the Disproportionate Impact of the Pandemic on Women?

With seemingly no attempt to address the disparities related to women’s livelihood, education and nutrition, the Centre’s endeavour towards economic recovery might not be inclusive.

With “inclusive development for aspirational India” being a pillar of the 2021-22 budget, there was no better opportunity to take on the gender disparities that resulted in making women more vulnerable to the ripple effects of COVID-19. With seemingly no attempt to address these disparities, India’s supposedly bold endeavour towards economic recovery, might not be inclusive and for this reason not resilient either.

The 2021-22 gender budget estimates (BE) saw a modest rise of 6.8% from last year’s BE. However, there is a steep 26% decrease in allocation from the 2020-21 revised estimates (RE). One can say that 2020-21 was unprecedented and hence the RE was much higher due to increased spend on welfare and direct benefit programmes. But are we out of the crisis yet?

Vulnerable women’s livelihoods not a priority

Bridging the gender inequality in employment and domestic time use is key to women’s economic empowerment. Female labour force participation rate in India is only 23.6% and about 94% of women workers in India are employed in the informal sector.

COVID has hit informal work and women-dominated sectors hard. The impact on the livelihood of Indian women has not been acknowledged in the budget. While we did not see many sector-specific revival measures, even MGNREGS, which was a lifeline for women affected by the lockdown, has seen its allocation reduced by 34.5% from the RE of 2020-21. Since a majority of beneficiaries of MGNREGS have been women over many years, this step will hit women hard at a vulnerable time. Allocation towards NRLM (National Rural Livelihood Mission) and NULM (National Urban Livelihoods Mission) would not provide immediate livelihood security.

Since the textiles industry is a women-dominated sector, the proposed launch of seven ‘Mega Investment Textiles Parks’ over the next three years is the only proposal that seems to help the cause of women’s employment. The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) would also strengthen women’s economic empowerment by continuing to enable asset ownership. The women specific component for PMAY-urban has been increased from 32.4% of total outlay in BE 2020-21 to 90.7% in BE 2021-22. Additionally, Rs 1,000 crore has been allocated to the welfare of tea workers, especially women and children, in Bengal and Assam. Although the political motivation behind this allocation is clear, this funding will be beneficial for the female tea workers that comprise more than 50% of the tea estate workforce.

The MSME sector has been provided Rs 15,700 crore in the budget, more than double 2020-21’s BE. Given that about 20% of MSMEs, more specifically micro enterprises, are owned by women and women face significant constraints in access to finance and skills, a gender-targeted component would have prevented women from being crowded out of such credit schemes.

Also read: Activists Slam Reducing Budget Allocation for Critical Women and Child Nutrition Schemes Amid COVID

Lack of infrastructure support and safety to seek paid work

One of the major reasons keeping Indian women from paid work is their unrecognised domestic and care work which is considerably more than men. COVID-19 has induced a 30% rise in this. An additional one crore Ujjwala beneficiaries and launching of the Jal Jeevan Mission (Urban) are welcome measures and will help women both in terms of health and also by reducing their burden of domestic work.

However, this year’s budget has reduced the provision for schemes now grouped under Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0 by 18% as compared to BE 2020-21. Removing essential child care and child development infrastructure funding that help women in making the choice towards paid work is a step back. This has been done when calls for a woman-led recovery are gaining momentum globally.

Net allocation for ‘schemes for safety of women’ under the Ministry of Home Affairs is only Rs 100 crore as compared to Rs 855.23 crore in 2020-21 BE. This 88.3% decline seems to run contrary to the budget announcement that “women will be allowed to work in all categories and also in the night shifts with adequate protection”.

Female education heading towards generational losses

School closures due to COVID-19 will lead to a decline in educational attainment, particularly for girls. And as warned by UNESCO, many girls might drop out. In this scenario, the overall outlay for education has been slashed by 8.3%. There are no substantial provisions for incentivising girls’ return to schools or covering up for the loss in educational attainment, which could lead to generational losses to the cause of women’s education. This funding is even insufficient for the roll-out of the National Education Policy that was to begin in 2021.

Also read: A Gender-Discriminatory Crisis Requires a Gender-Responsive Union Budget

Not only that, the flagship Samagra Shiksha programme’s overall and gender allocation has been reduced by 19.8% as compared to BE 2020-21. In fact, the budget for the National Scheme for Incentive to Girl Child for Secondary Education has been cut by 99%. While the allocation to mid-day meals has increased from BE 2020, it is a decline of 10.8% from RE 2020-21. A slight nod to the importance of digital literacy in the post-pandemic era has been given in the form of a small allocation towards PMGDISHA.

Nutrition ignored and frontline women workers unrewarded

A 137% rise in health and well-being budget was a big announcement. Upon closer look, a key component – nutrition – has seen a reduction from Rs 3,700 crore to Rs 2,700 crore i.e. by 27% from 2020-21 BE (table 1). It is also unclear how much funding the nutrition components of anganwadi, creche and scheme for adolescent girls will receive. Healthcare budget 2021-22 is a lost opportunity to go beyond mere symbolism of banging thalis and clapping, by meaningfully recognising the frontline ASHA, anganwadi and auxiliary nurse midwife workers, by formalising their work and providing them with better terms of employment and wages.

Adding to the pandemic-related woes of women is the shadow pandemic of violence and abuse that the COVID-19 induced lockdown and distancing has exacerbated. Given this realisation, it was hoped that the government would do more to address these issues. On the contrary, budget on protection, safety and empowerment schemes, now grouped under Mission SHAKTI as SAMBAL and SAMARTHYA, has gone down.

Gender-neutral initiatives have a gender skewed impact. We can no longer work on the assumption that women will automatically benefit. The time for affirmative action is now and the implementation of the budget should happen with this aspect in mind.

Shagufta Gupta is a senior fellow at CUTS International, Poulomi Ghosh is research associate at IIM Calcutta and Shalu Bindal is an independent researcher.

Global Cost of Not Educating Girls Is $15-30 Trillion: World Bank

According to the World Bank, less than two thirds of girls in low-income countries complete primary school and only one in three girls completes lower secondary school.

Washington: Not educating girls or creating barriers in their school education globally costs between $ 15 trillion to $ 30 trillion, the World Bank said as the UN marks ‘Malala Day’ today.

Less than two thirds of girls in low-income countries complete primary school and only one in three girls completes lower secondary school, the World Bank said in a new report ‘Missed Opportunities: The High Cost of Not Educating Girls’.

“The loss in human capital wealth incurred today because many adult women did not benefit in their youth from universal secondary education (defined as 12 years of schooling) is estimated to range between $ 15 trillion to $ 30 trillion globally,” said the report released on the eve of UN ‘Malala Day’.

On an average, women who have a secondary education are more likely to work and they earn almost twice as much as those with no education, it said.

Malala Yousafzai, the youngest ever Nobel Laureate, who was shot in head by the Taliban militants for campaigning for female education in 2012 in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, spoke at the UN on her 16th birthday on July 12, 2013, to call for a worldwide access to education. The UN had dubbed the event as “Malala Day”.

Malala, who turned 21 today, said, “When 130 million girls are unable to become engineers or journalists or CEOs because education is out of their reach, our world misses out on trillions of dollars that could strengthen the global economy, public health and stability.”

“If leaders are serious about building a better world, they need to start with serious investments in girls’ secondary education. This report is more proof that we cannot afford to delay investing in girls,” said the Malala Fund co-founder.

According to the report, today some 132 million girls around the world between the ages of 6 and 17 are still not in school, 75 % of whom are adolescents.

“We cannot keep letting gender inequality get in the way of global progress,” said World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva.

“Inequality in education is yet another fixable issue that is costing the world trillions. It is time to close the gender gap in education and give girls and boys an equal chance to succeed, for the good of everyone,” Georgieva said.

According to a World Bank analysis, women’s educational attainment has a large potential impact on their lifetime fertility and population growth, both directly and through a reduction in child marriage and early childbearing.

In the 18 countries for which simulations were carried with demographic projection tools, the average reduction in population growth was estimated at -0.18 % points, it said, adding that the reductions in annual population growth rates are, however, different depending on which country is considered.

“In India, the largest of the 18 countries, the reduction was estimated at only -0.08 % point because the country has already gone through much of its demographic transition,” the report said.

“For perspective, India’s annual population growth rate is currently at 1.2 % per year, versus more than two per cent and in some cases three per cent or more per year for many other countries included in the simulations,” it said.

(PTI)

Why Indian Workplaces Are Losing Women

Female labour participation in India is plummeting in spite of rising girls’ education: why and how do we fix it?

If the number of women who quit jobs in India between 2004 and 2012 was a city, it would be 19.6 million strong and the third-most populated in the world after Shanghai and Beijing.

Female participation in the Indian workforce has decreased in recent years. Credit: Pixabay via IndiaSpend

In the first four months of 2017, a nugget of information went by unnoticed: while jobs for men increased by 0.9 million, 2.4 million women fell off the employment map, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), a think tank.

“Only women suffer when there’s an employment problem,” said Mahesh Vyas, CMIE managing director and CEO.

The trend for this year points to a continuing story of Indian women increasingly clocking out of the workplace. It might not seem like it at first glance. You see women employed everywhere, in ad agencies and start-ups, on construction sites and in fields, in shops and restaurants, in schools and anganwadis, flying airplanes and driving taxis.

Yet, if the number of women who quit jobs in India between 2004-05 and 2011-12 (the last year for which census data is available), was a city, it would, at 19.6 million, be the third-most populated in the world, after Shanghai and Beijing.

Only 27% Indian women are currently in the labour force. Among G-20 countries, only Saudi Arabia is worse, IndiaSpend reported on April 9, 2016. Within South Asia in 2013, India had the lowest rate of female employment after Pakistan. In over two decades preceding 2013, female labour force participation in India fell from 34.8% to 27%, according to an April 2017 World Bank report.

India’s female labour force participation (FLFP) rate is highest among illiterates and college graduates in both rural and urban areas, according to this March 2017 World Bank report, which analysed government data from 2004-05 to 2011-12. These two groups, illiterates and those with college education, are also the groups that experienced the largest drops in FLFP rates over this period.

There are no indications that it’s getting better.

Much of this slide has come in the post liberalisation years, when you would imagine that a growing economy would fling open doors of opportunity. At roughly the same time that women were quitting jobs, an additional 24.3 million men went to work, according to an April 2017 World Bank report, Precarious Drop: Reassessing Patterns of Female Labour Force Participation in India.

Even more inexplicably, women went missing from the workplace at precisely the same time that girls were making massive advances in education. The enrolment rate of girls in elementary education is nearly 100%. In higher education, it’s nudged up from just 7.5% in 2002-03 to 20% in 2012-13.

Over the next few months IndiaSpend will track declining female labour force participation through on-the-ground reports that seek to understand the various constraints that inhibit their employment and participation in the workforce.

Education should lead to jobs, but that’s not happening in India

The logical link that education should lead to jobs is broken in India. In rural India, 67% of girls who are graduates do not work. In towns and cities, 68.3% of women who graduate don’t have paid jobs, says a 2015 report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Women’s Voices, Employment and Entrepreneurship in India.

“More girls are being educated than boys,” said Pronab Sen, country head for the International Growth Centre’s (IGC) India Central Programme and the country’s first chief statistician. “You have to ask, ‘where are they going and what are they doing’?”

Why should we care?

If women participated in the economy at par with men, India could increase GDP by up to 60%, or $2.9 trillion, by 2025, according to a 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute, a think tank. At present, women contribute a mere 17% to the country’s GDP, well below the global average of 37%.

Women’s earnings are also linked to their personal well-being. Quite simply, a woman who brings money into the house is likely to have greater clout and status in that family. Improved labour market prospects for daughters and daughters-in-law could lead to greater investment in their education and health.

But perhaps, most important, it matters because women want paid jobs. The 2011 National Sample Survey found that over a third of women in urban India and half in rural areas who engage mainly in housework want a paying job.

So, if women want jobs, why are they quitting? What’s holding them back?

The power of choice, the shame of a working wife: Complex reasons

Ongoing research and IndiaSpend’s own on-the-ground reporting suggests a complex web of constraints that keep women away from the workplace.

Chief amongst these is the issue of women’s agency.

A man is expected to have a paid job. When he seeks one, he needs nobody’s permission. Girls and women, on the other hand, almost without exception must have the permission of their fathers, brothers, husbands and in some cases even village panchayats in order to work or even learn skills that will make them employable.

In Haryana’s Jhajjar district, Jyoti Kadian, currently employed in a steel factory, will be getting married in November to a navy man who has told her he has no objections to her working – but only in a government job. “I’m trying to get one, but it’s not easy,” said Kadian, conscious that time is running out.

In Mumbai, Naseema Sheikh, the daughter of a plumber, joined a four-month beauty training course after completing 12^th grade in school. When she received a job offer from a beauty salon, her brother said there was no need for her to work. “He says, ‘I am providing for you so what need is there for you to go so far to work?’” she said.

In an Aurangabad slum, a truck driver tells me why he refused permission to let his 19-year-old daughter work in a restaurant after she completed a two-month hospitality course with Pratham Institute. “Next thing you know, she will be running off to have a love marriage, and I will not be able to show my face anywhere,” he said. In the small one-room house where he lives with five daughters and a son, his wife said not a word. Asked what she felt about a working daughter, she shrugged her shoulders and then got up to make tea.

When her husband got transferred to Mizoram, patent attorney Priyadarshini Gauri found herself without a job after working for nine years. “I would have liked some remote working opportunities in my field but there were none,” she said. While she waits for his three-year posting to end, she has had a baby, enrolled in a masters in history and is learning to play the guitar.

“I miss those good old days when you know you’ve done terrific work,” she said in an email interview. “Being employed gives you a validation that no amount of ‘home-making’ can.”

Patriarchy, cultural and social attitudes exist all over India. But in many states in the north, there’s a feeling of ‘shame’ if a man’s wife works, said Pronab Sen. Unsurprisingly, Bihar, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab report the lowest rates of female labour force participation, whereas hill states such as Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh where men have historically migrated out for work, leaving women in charge of village economies, female labour force participation or FLFP to use a brief acronym for a distressing trend, is high

Family and responsibility for household work are other serious constraints. Women either don’t accept jobs, or quit because of ‘family reasons’ found a 2016 study of young, single women by Evidence for Policy Design, a team of Harvard faculty researchers from the Harvard Kennedy School.

‘In the end, it’s difficult to find a job if you can’t leave home alone’

Social norms about appropriate behaviour for women and the enforcement of these norms by parents, in-laws and husbands dictates their ability to seek employment. The 2011 Indian Human Development Survey finds that a sizeable number of women need to take permission from a family member to even go to the market or health centre, said Rohini Pande of Harvard Kennedy School. “In the end, it’s pretty difficult to look for a job if you can’t leave the house alone,” she said.

Even when women are ‘allowed’ to work, there are conditions that must be met. Is the job close to home? Are there fixed working hours that will allow her to be back in time to cook the dinner and put the kids to bed? Is safe and inexpensive public transportation available?

Safety is emerging as a key concern, said Farzana Afridi, associate professor with the Indian Statistical Institute. Public spaces are dominated by men. Moreover, there’s a dire shortage of infrastructure that would enable women’s participation in the workplace – hostels for working women and crèches for their children, for instance.

“Managements will often tell you how women make for very reliable employees with low absenteeism and attrition rates,” said Afridi. “But not many are prepared to provide the infrastructure that would enable their fuller participation.”

Medha Uniyal, programme director of the Pratham Institute was more blunt: “When you have women on the payroll, you are legally required to provide facilities like a crèche. So, a lot of employers have a clear mandate of not hiring women.”

The role of companies in nurturing gender diversity certainly calls for scrutiny. After women manage to convince their families to allow them work, they often encounter yet another hurdle: companies that don’t want to hire them. “There is a clear case of discrimination by companies that give women a raw deal,” said CMIE’s Mahesh Vyas.

Finally, women themselves seem inclined to choose trades that are traditionally ‘women oriented’: beauty and healthcare for instance. “Social norms and a lack of information often limit women’s opportunities to so-called “traditional” jobs, closely linked to typical ideas of what women can and cannot do,” said Clement Chauvet, chief of skills and business development, UNDP.

Sectors with fastest growth, most jobs are dominated by men

Unfortunately, sectors with the fastest growth and maximum hiring – telecom, banking and the core sectors — are dominated by men. In telecom, 83.84% of all employees are men; 78.79% in banking, financial services and insurance and 74.75% in core sectors like oil and gas, power, steel and minerals, according to the India Skills Report 2017. Women themselves show a clear preference for trades that are traditionally ‘women oriented’: beauty and healthcare for instance, said Clement Chauvet, UNDP’s chief of skills and development.

An obvious solution is skilling. The prime minister’s Skill India Mission is targeted to train over 400 million people by 2022.

But there’s a mismatch between vocational skills programmes, aspiration and the job market. “It’s important that we make sure we skill young people to meet what industry demands,” said Chauvet.

Moreover, existing skilling programmes are simply too small to count, said IGC’s Sen. The bulk of skilling programmes take place as apprenticeships with ustads or in small-scale industries that are male dominated and where fathers and husbands do not like sending their girls and wives.

Another solution would be to make it incumbent upon companies to disclose gender diversity in hiring employees. “I’m not suggesting there should be reservation. But companies that function on shareholder money and bank loans should be made to disclose the gender breakup of their employees,” said Vyas.

All women work. Much of it – fetching firewood and water, cooking and cleaning, taking care of children and the elderly in India — is unpaid and unrecognised.

Very often, women seek employment when there is poverty and they must contribute to the household income just to survive. But when household incomes increase, they might consider the option of quitting paid work. Typically, when economies expand and the services sector grows, they get back into the workforce.

This upswing of what economists call the ‘U-curve’ hasn’t happened yet. When it will – or even if — is the big question.

Namita Bhandare is a Delhi-based journalist who writes frequently on gender issues confronting India.

This article is published courtesy of IndiaSpend. Read the original here.