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Grace Marks

The subsoil of the economy? No, India's working women are invisible only because we choose not to look...

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Grace Marks
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Kaam rukwadiya ha...kya dihari doge
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Juliana Bilung: 45 and single, she left her village in Jharkhand 15 years ago to work as a house maid in Delhi. Half of the Rs 3,500 she earns per month goes back home.

It's not as crazy an idea as it sounds. Women workers in the 'informal economy'—those vast shadowlands where productive and household work flow in and out of each other and employment guarantees are missing—are collectively contributing hugely to India's GDP. In fact, several times more than their female counterparts in offices, corporations, institutions, hotels and smart retail shops, who add up to a minuscule 4 per cent of India's female workforce.

Since there are no official statistics available that directly capture this contribution, it can only be estimated indirectly. We know from National Accounts Statistics on informal enterprises that this segment of the economy currently contributes around 60 per cent of the country's GDP. One argument made, therefore, is that since women constitute one-third of the workforce in the informal economy, 118 million women by the last count, they may well be contributing 20 per cent to the GDP. According to current numbers, that is nothing less than Rs 5,66,093 crore. By way of comparison, the turnover of Reliance Industries, India's largest corporate firm, in 2004-2005, was about 2.3 per cent of the GDP.

But economist Jeemol Unni, a consultant with the recently formed National Commission for Unorganised Enterprises, says even 20 per cent may be an underestimation. For two reasons. One, many more women are working than the data suggests. They get left out when the counting is done, partly because of their own invisibility, and partly because enumerators do not always ask the right questions. Secondly, as Unni puts it, "A computation based purely on employment figures does not accurately capture the contribution of women to the informal economy. We must be able to base it on the actual value added to get a true picture."

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K. Balamani: A bidi worker from Parsigutta, Secunderabad. She works eight hours a day to produce up to a 1,000 bidis for Rs 38. About 90% of the 8 lakh bidi workers in AP are women.

With the statistical system not oriented towards measuring contribution in these terms, micro studies are attempting to bring their own kind of clarity to a fuzzy picture. They show that women in the informal economy are doing more unquantified productive work than we think they are (and more than they think they are), for longer hours than we assume and in many more ways than we imagine.

For example, a study carried out by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in Punjab showed that women are adding far more value than recognised to dairy farming, a fast-growing segment of the economy, with milk production zooming from 53.9 million tonnes in 1990-1991 to 91 million tonnes in 2004-2005 to fuel an ever-increasing demand for milk.

According to the study, which surveyed 200 households in four villages of Punjab in 2000, giving due weight to caste and class, women on average do more work than men. Their contribution amounted to 64 per cent of family labour and 16 per cent of hired labour, making women's input about 53 per cent of the total labour input. It was also found that women's share was highest in landless households, where they did about three-fourths of the work. And yet, the 1991 census did not report a single woman as being engaged in livestock activities in any of the four villages surveyed. Says NCAER economist Rupinder Kaur, who led the project, "There is a gross underestimation of women's contribution to dairy farming. It is seen as part of housework. Even society does not perceive it as economic activity."

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Rami Bai: A Lambani artisan from Sandur, Karnataka, whose traditional embroidery work has been reinvented for a growing domestic and international market 

Studies are also putting the spotlight on an army of home-based workers working "piece rate" for subcontracting chains or as small independent producers. Official statistics put the size of this army at 30 million but unofficially, it is estimated to be double that number—and the figures are moving upwards, as liberalisation and globalisation ratchet up the demand for cheap and flexible labour. This expanding category of workers partly explains why the female urban workforce is growing faster than the male urban workforce.

Many such women are popularly perceived to be working 'part-time,' because they combine household and productive work. Not so, according to an NCAER survey of agarbatti workers in Bangalore, bidi workers in Indore and North Arcot district, Tamil Nadu, and zardosi workers in Lucknow. It concludes that on average, the women put in 8.3 hours of work a day, from a high of 9.8 hours for bidi in Madhya Pradesh to 7.4 hours for agarbatti work.

What's well known is that lakhs of women workers support a fast-expanding textile and garment industry that contributes about 35 per cent to the country's gross export earnings. What isn't well known is that women working from home are also doing jobs not usually perceived as 'women's work'.

A 2002 study on subcontracting to home-based women workers in the manufacturing sector points to new trends in the employment of such women. They are assembling bicycle parts in Ludhiana, making locks in Aligarh and assembling electric sockets, plugs and switches in the shantytowns of Jogeshwari in Mumbai.

Says development consultant Ashok Raj, who carried out the study for UNIFEM: " The scale of this work has not been recognised."

In the crafts sector too, there is a trend towards increasing participation of women even though the workforce is still predominantly male. Studies show women artisans dominating areas such as embroidery, lace-making and weaving of reed mats.

With state support, rising domestic demand, a phenomenal expansion in the export market in the last decade, and the platforms provided by SEWA, Dastkar and Dastkari Haat Samiti, craftswomen are able to make hefty contributions to the economy. For instance, exports of embroidered goods, a field in which nearly three-fourths of the artisans are women, have gone up over 30 per cent in the last decade.

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Jaywanti: Married with a child, she works office hours at her charkha everyday, spinning yarn onto bobbins that go tohandloom weavers. She earns Rs 25 a day.

After the Kutch embroiders and the SEWA chikan workers, other success stories, big and small, are in the making, for example, the Lambani women from Sandur, Karnataka, basket weavers from Haryana, UP, Bihar, Kerala, reinventing traditional skills for an urban market and selling to mithaiwalas and hoteliers, exporters and retail stores. Add to all that the silent contributions that women in artisan households make to the work of craftsmen. "Traditionally, women are not allowed to turn the potter's wheel, but fetching clay, kneading it, pounding it, is all a woman's job, also stacking pots and painting them. None of this is costed," says Jaya Jaitly of the Dastkari Haat Samiti.

"If the economy is a pyramid, the bottom of the pyramid is supported by women," says SEWA's national coordinator, Renana Jhabvala.

Bottom of the pyramid has, of course, negative as well as positive connotations. The positive, is, as Jhabvala puts it, "Without the bottom you would not have that pyramid." The negative is large numbers of women doing the worst jobs, the most irregular, the most dependent, the most labour-intensive.

No discussion of women's work can avoid this double edge.


"Urban female workforce growing faster than men" or "new opportunities opening up for home-based workers in the garment export sector" also means women being hired because they are easier to fire. Women being recruited for technical tasks that refute gender stereotyping are also women who can be paid much less than men.

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Shabnam: The top she’s working on is destined for a leading American retailer of casualwear. She goesto school and sews in the afternoons. 

Subhash Bhatnagar, advisor to Nirmala Niketan, an organisation of domestic workers, tells you with some pride that one lakh women from the tribal areas of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and West Orissa working in Delhi are making a 'hidden, silent and very important contribution to the economy' by supporting working mothers, children and the elderly and sending at least Rs 100 crore home every year. In the same breath, he speaks of tribal women who don't get married for years, and of the social imbalances and frustrations that arise from this large-scale migration of women.

Says Ratna Sudarshan, director of the Institute of Social Sciences Trust, "Women's contributions to the economy can be empowering but they can equally be disempowering. The sharp rise in lower-end services is a good outcome for the middle class, is it a good outcome for poor women themselves?"

In short, the question of what poor women are doing for the economy inescapably has a flipside: what is the economy, state, society, doing for them?

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