Geopolitics & Economy · March 2026
The Fire Next Door: How a War India Didn’t Start Is Burning Through Its Kitchens, Its Ports, and Its Pride
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran. India fired not a single shot. Yet, from a fisherman’s wife in Chennai waiting three weeks for a cooking-gas cylinder to a naval analyst in Delhi watching a torpedo video from the Indian Ocean, the war has landed — quietly, shockingly, and in ways no government briefing had quite anticipated.
The queue outside the HP Gas distributor on Nungambakkam High Road in Chennai had been there for eleven days when Meenakshi Subramaniam, a retired schoolteacher, counted the cylinders in her kitchen cupboard. She had two. At the government’s new rationing pace — one refill every 25 days — her next delivery would come sometime in mid-April. By then, her son’s restaurant in Mylapore, which ran on commercial LPG, would have been shut for nearly three weeks.
Meenakshi’s situation, multiplied across hundreds of millions of Indian households, is both personal and deeply structural. The war between the United States, Israel, and Iran has produced a domestic energy crisis in India that is far more intimate and disruptive than most wars fought 3,000 kilometres away tend to be. India didn’t want this war, hasn’t joined it, and may yet pay a heavier price for it than almost any other non-belligerent.
This is the story of how a country of 1.4 billion people — the world’s fourth-largest economy and keeper of its doctrine of “strategic autonomy” — found itself queuing for cooking gas, watching a guest warship sink in the Indian Ocean, and quietly negotiating with the very country its ally had just bombed.
I. The Strait That Holds 310 Million Kitchens Hostage
To understand why the Strait of Hormuz — a sliver of sea between Iran and Oman, barely 34 kilometres wide at its narrowest — can bring middle-class India to the edge of panic, you need to understand the numbers behind the world’s largest cooking-gas welfare programme.
India’s Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, launched in 2016, enrolled 103 million poor households into subsidised LPG. Including earlier connections, India today has over 310 million LPG connections — the most of any country in the world. In February 2026, LPG demand hit 2.8 million tonnes, a ten percent year-on-year increase and the highest daily consumption ever recorded.
The supply chain behind this is dangerously concentrated. India produces only about 40 percent of its LPG domestically. The rest — around 67 percent of requirements — is imported, and roughly 90 percent of those imports transit through the Strait of Hormuz, primarily from Qatar (India’s largest supplier at 34 percent), the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. When Iran announced on March 1 that the Strait was closed and threatened to “set on fire” any vessel attempting to pass, the numbers for India turned alarming almost immediately.
India’s LPG Exposure — Key Numbers
- 310 million+ LPG connections nationwide
- 67% of LPG is imported; 90% of those imports transit Hormuz
- Strategic reserves at outbreak of War: ~5 days of domestic demand
- Domestic LPG price hike on March 7: ₹60 for a 14.2 kg cylinder (Delhi: ₹913)
- Commercial 19 kg cylinder: rose ~₹115 (Delhi: ₹1,883)
- Black market price in some cities: ₹4,000+ per cylinder
- Government crackdown: 12,000+ raids, 15,000+ cylinders seized under Essential Commodities Act
The disruption cascaded quickly. Commercial LPG allocations were cut by up to 80 percent within days. In Bengaluru, hotel associations reported that only ten percent of member restaurants received gas supplies on March 10. In Mumbai, commercial refill delays stretched to eight days, then stopped. The government invoked the Essential Commodities Act, created a four-tier gas priority system — households first, hospitals second, restaurants last — and asked Coal India to supply coal to small food businesses. Parts of Old Delhi and Chennai’s street-food corridors began smelling of woodsmoke for the first time in decades.
Case Study I
The Restaurant Crisis: 10,000 Closures and a ₹1,200 Crore Daily Hit
The National Restaurant Association of India estimated that 75 percent of India’s food-service sector runs on LPG, and that a prolonged shortage could cost the economy between ₹1,200 and ₹1,300 crore per day — roughly $150 million. M. Ravi, president of the Chennai Hotel Association, told journalists that nearly 10,000 establishments across Tamil Nadu faced closure by March 12. Mumbai-based lobby group AHAR warned its members were on the “verge of closure.” Stock markets reflected the damage: shares of quick-service restaurant operators Sapphire Foods and Devyani International fell 21 and 19 percent respectively in the three weeks after war began.
The government eventually approved an extra allocation of 20 percent of each state’s monthly commercial LPG requirement, bringing total supply to about half of normal needs. Restaurants were formally permitted to use biomass for a month. The government asked Coal India to route supplies to small businesses. What was an extraordinary energy crisis was, for now, being managed — but at a cost that no policy framework had priced in.
HSBC, in a note widely circulated in Indian financial circles, called this shock “more complex than previous oil disruptions.” Unlike earlier Gulf crises driven purely by crude price spikes, this one centred on a physical shortage of LNG and LPG — fuels for which alternative routing is either expensive or structurally impossible at short notice. The bank estimated a potential 25 percent shortfall in natural gas supply, which could shave roughly 25 basis points from GDP growth if the crunch lasted a full quarter. The burden would fall approximately 70 percent on consumers and 30 percent on businesses.
Two Indian-flagged tankers — the Shivalik, carrying 40,000 metric tonnes of LPG, and the Nanda Devi — became the unlikely focal point of India’s most consequential diplomatic negotiation of the year. After External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar spoke with his Iranian counterpart four times in less than two weeks, and Prime Minister Modi called Iranian Premier Masoud Pezeshkian on March 12, Iran permitted these two vessels through the Strait on a case-by-case basis. They arrived at Indian ports on March 16 and 17. Two ships, out of 22 waiting.
II. The Guest Ship and the Torpedo
Of all the things this war has done to India, the most symbolically striking happened not in a kitchen queue or on a stock exchange, but in dark water 44 nautical miles south of Galle, Sri Lanka, in the early hours of March 4.
The IRIS Dena was an Iranian Navy frigate returning home. It was not heading to a fight. In the weeks before Operation Epic Fury began, the Dena had participated in India’s International Fleet Review 2026 and the biennial Milan naval exercise, held in Visakhapatnam from February 15 to 25 — India’s largest such event, with 74 countries and 18 foreign warships.
Three days after the Milan exercise ended, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury. The Dena was still sailing through the Indian Ocean. On March 4, the USS Charlotte — a Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarine — fired two Mark 48 torpedoes without warning. One struck home. The ship sank in under three minutes. Of approximately 180 sailors aboard, 87 were confirmed dead. At least 61 remained missing.
It was the first time since World War II that a US Navy submarine had sunk an enemy surface vessel. And it happened in India’s maritime backyard.
The two surviving Iranian vessels — the Lavan and a second ship — sought sanctuary in Indian and Sri Lankan ports. India agreed.
III. $50 Billion in Remittances, Nine Million Reasons to Worry
Walk through the back streets of Thrissur in Kerala or the smaller towns of coastal Andhra Pradesh and you find a particular kind of prosperity — tile-clad houses that were once palm-thatched, school fees paid in dirhams, families built on Gulf salary transfers that arrive every month via WhatsApp-linked apps. This is the geography of fifty years of Gulf migration, and it underpins a significant share of India’s external finances.
There are approximately 9.1 million Indians working across the six GCC countries — UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, and Bahrain. In FY 2024–25, they sent home an estimated $51.4 billion — about 38 percent of India’s total inward remittances of $135.4 billion, itself a global record. To put this in perspective: India’s entire trade surplus with the United States in 2025 was $58.2 billion. The Gulf remittance flow is, in effect, a second balance-of-payments pillar.
India’s Remittance Exposure — The Gulf Numbers
- 9.1 million Indians in GCC countries — the region’s largest foreign workforce
- ~$51.4 billion annually from Gulf — 38% of India’s total $135.4 billion inflows
- Remittances = ~3.5% of India’s GDP
- ~220,000 Indians have returned since the war began
- March 2026: remittance inflows from West Asia reportedly 20–30% above normal — a sign of worker anxiety.
Since the war began, Iranian strikes have spread beyond Iran itself to industrial zones across the Gulf. Two Indian workers were killed and nine injured in a drone strike near Sohar, Oman. U.S. embassies in Riyadh and Kuwait were targeted. The financial panic arrived quickly: March remittance inflows from West Asia ran 20 to 30 percent above normal as workers sent home larger sums — not because they were earning more, but because they were afraid. Workers were, in effect, liquidating their Gulf bank accounts while they still could.
The present surge should not be mistaken for good news. It is a sign of anxiety. If the conflict extends beyond six months, it will have a material impact on the Indian economy. A slowdown in Gulf construction, hospitality, and oil services — where most Indian blue-collar workers are concentrated — could translate into mass layoffs, falling remittance flows, and a surge of returning migrants that India’s domestic labour market would struggle to absorb.
Case Study II
The Kerala Circuit: When the War Arrives at a District Collector’s Desk
Kerala, which sends more migrants to the Gulf per capita than almost any other Indian state, runs what amounts to a shadow economy calibrated entirely to the Gulf business cycle. The state’s NORKA department runs a dedicated crisis cell. Since early March, district collectors in Malappuram and Thrissur — both heavy Gulf-migration districts — have been fielding a new kind of distress: families unable to reach relatives in Oman and Bahrain, or receiving sudden lump-sum transfers that signal panic rather than prosperity. The Ministry of External Affairs has set up a special control room for Gulf-based Indians. What is notable is how quickly these welfare systems activated — India had, in some sense, prepared for a human Gulf crisis. What it had not planned for was a simultaneous energy crisis arriving through the same geography.
IV. The Unseen Casualties: Rice in Warehouses, Tea in Storage, Fruit at the Docks
The trade damage has received less attention than the LPG queues or the diplomatic manoeuvring, but for those living inside it, it is both acute and — in many cases — financially irreversible.
Case Study III
The Rice Mills That Went Quiet: Madhya Pradesh’s Basmati Crisis
When there is no war, the rice mills of Raisen district in Madhya Pradesh hum through the night in March. The Pusa basmati — long-grained, fragrant, grown along the banks of the Narmada — tumbles through milling machines in the industrial clusters of Mandideep, Satlapur, and Obedullaganj, gets sorted into cream and golden sella varieties, loaded into containers at Nhava Sheva in Navi Mumbai, and sails into the Persian Gulf just in time to stock up for Ramzan. Raisen district cultivates paddy on approximately 3.45 lakh hectares, producing over 6 lakh tonnes of rice annually, with more than two dozen factories feeding markets in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Dubai.
This year, the machines have gone quiet.
Since February 28, basmati rice from Raisen is stuck in ports, factories, and warehouses. Freight rates have climbed more than 30 percent, container availability has collapsed, and war-risk insurance for Gulf-bound vessels has become either unavailable or too expensive. Exporter Mithlesh Soni told journalists he cannot locate 40 containers of his own rice. “We are unable to track our shipment. There is no clarity on where they are or when they will reach,” he said. Another exporter, Hansraj Soni, said shipping lines are imposing surcharges of $2,000 to $2,500 per container and buyers are refusing to pay. “Around 35 of my containers are stuck. I am already looking at a loss of roughly ₹2 lakh per container,” he said.
The price of Pusa basmati has fallen ₹300 to ₹500 per quintal in wholesale markets. Rice factory operator Manoj Soni put it plainly: “This has disrupted the arrival of paddy and raw materials, weakening the supply chain. It has distressed farmers. If the war continues, small and medium industries will be particularly affected.” Across India, over 4 lakh metric tonnes of basmati rice are currently stranded at ports or in transit. Payments worth ₹2,000 crore to ₹25,000 crore are pending. The Gulf absorbs 70 percent of India’s total rice exports — and it is simply the only market that wants what Raisen produces. Europe and the US do not import the same varieties. There is no quick pivot.
Before the war, approximately 500 tonnes of Balaghat’s non-basmati boiled rice — which carries its own district GI tag — were exported daily. That flow has now nearly stopped. Rice exports to East African countries have virtually ceased. Container freight rates that tracked at $2,500 before the crisis have spiked to between $7,000 and $9,000. Small millers in Balaghat, Warasivani, and Katangi say those on a smaller scale have come to a complete standstill.
Basmati rice is only one thread of a wider unravelling. Iran accounts for roughly 23 percent of India’s apple imports and 39 percent of its almond imports. Both flows have stopped. Indian banana exports to the Gulf are sitting in refrigerated containers at ports like Kandla, because no shipping company willing to enter the war zone is available to carry them.
Tea tells another quiet story. Iran historically absorbed 15 to 20 percent of India’s tea exports through the Rial-Rupee barter mechanism — a bilateral payment system built precisely to circumvent dollar-based sanctions. That mechanism is now frozen. Tea stocks are accumulating in warehouses in Kolkata and Kochi, while small planters in Assam’s Sivasagar district and the Darjeeling gardens absorb storage costs with no clear end date.
Plastics, too, face a reckoning. With roughly 55 percent of India’s natural gas imports now under “force majeure” declarations, analysts forecast plastic product price increases of 50 to 60 percent in coming months. Every plastic water pipe, irrigation drip-line, food-grade container, and two-wheeler body panel that India manufactures depends on petrochemical feedstock. A sustained 50 percent input price spike would compress margins across Indian manufacturing at a time when global demand is already slowing.
V. The Rupee, the Current Account, and the Goldman Warning
For India’s economists, the war has delivered “a more complex shock than previous oil disruptions” — arriving through at least four channels simultaneously: higher crude prices (Brent between $110 and $120 per barrel by mid-March, up from $78 before the war), a physical shortage of LNG and LPG, disrupted trade, and remittance uncertainty. The rupee crossed ₹92 per dollar — a level not seen since 2022 — adding 10 to 15 percent to the cost of all dollar-denominated imports.
Goldman Sachs warned that India’s “positive growth story” now faces a “new broadside” from higher energy costs, slower exports, and weaker remittance inflows. India’s stock markets fell approximately 10 percent in the month after the war started.
One buffer has emerged: on March 5, the US Treasury issued a 30-day waiver allowing Indian refiners to buy Russian crude already at sea. Approximately 70 percent of India’s crude is now sourced outside the Strait of Hormuz. It is the LPG and LNG markets — structurally harder to reroute — that remain most exposed.
VI. The Chabahar Silence
There is one thread in the India-Iran relationship that rarely makes headline summaries but sits at the heart of India’s long-term connectivity ambitions: the port of Chabahar on Iran’s southeastern coast, which India has spent two decades developing as its gateway to Central Asia — bypassing Pakistan’s hostile intermediary role entirely.
In May 2024, India signed a ten-year operational contract for Chabahar’s Shahid Beheshti terminal — a significant step toward activating the International North-South Transport Corridor linking Mumbai to Moscow via Tehran. The contract survived previous rounds of US sanctions because Washington granted India a specific exemption. Whether that exemption survives the current conflict is uncertain. The result is that India’s most significant strategic infrastructure investment in the region is effectively frozen at the moment.
VII. The Diplomatic Tightrope
India has 9.5 million people in the Gulf. It needs Iranian goodwill to move tankers through the Strait. It needs US goodwill for defence technology, semiconductor supply chains, and the Quad. It needs Israeli goodwill for precision defence systems and agricultural technology. What it needs, simultaneously and from all three, is diplomatically incompatible — and the contradictions are becoming harder to manage.
VIII. The Induction Cooker and the Long Reckoning
One data point from the crisis captures, more than any policy analysis, how ordinary Indians responded to the extraordinary. On Amazon India, sales of induction cooktops increased more than thirtyfold after the Hormuz closure. The image of a family unboxing an induction stove in a panic purchase — driven by a war in the Persian Gulf — is both absurd and entirely clarifying.
It clarifies how concentrated India’s structural energy vulnerability actually is: 1.4 billion people, 310 million cooking-gas connections, all flowing through a 34-kilometre maritime chokepoint. It clarifies how thin India’s strategic LPG reserves were at the war’s start — roughly five days of domestic demand, well below the internationally recommended 90-day buffer. It clarifies how the Ujjwala welfare programme, for all its genuine achievements in reducing kerosene dependence, was built on an import chain that no one had stress-tested against a Hormuz closure.
The government has moved quickly: domestic LPG production rose an estimated 30 percent after emergency directives, the Essential Commodities Act was invoked, a rationing system was created, and the Navy deployed escorts for merchant vessels in high-risk zones. These are crisis responses, and they are working — for now. But they are not structural fixes. India still has no strategic LPG reserve of any meaningful scale. It still lacks import-source diversification sufficient to blunt a repeat of this crisis.
Back on Nungambakkam High Road in Chennai, Meenakshi Subramaniam received her LPG cylinder on March 19 — later than expected, earlier than feared. Her son’s restaurant reopened on a reduced menu. The induction cooktop she had ordered was still in the box when she last spoke with a reporter. “Insurance,” she said. “For next time.”
In India, this kind of insurance is not pessimism. It is memory. And increasingly, it is policy.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.
On March 31, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its annual Gender Gap Report 2021. The Global Gender Gap report is an annual report released by the WEF. The gender gap is the difference between women and men as reflected in social, political, intellectual, cultural, or economic attainments or attitudes. The gap between men and women across health, education, politics, and economics widened for the first time since records began in 2006.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]No need to remember all the data, only pick out few important ones to use in your answers.
The Global gender gap index aims to measure this gap in four key areas : health, education, economics, and politics. It surveys economies to measure gender disparity by collating and analyzing data that fall under four indices : economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
The 2021 Global Gender Gap Index benchmarks 156 countries on their progress towards gender parity. The index aims to serve as a compass to track progress on relative gaps between women and men in health, education, economy, and politics.
Although no country has achieved full gender parity, the top two countries (Iceland and Finland) have closed at least 85% of their gap, and the remaining seven countries (Lithuania, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Rwanda, and Ireland) have closed at least 80% of their gap. Geographically, the global top 10 continues to be dominated by Nordic countries, with —Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—in the top five.
The top 10 is completed by one country from Asia Pacific (New Zealand 4th), two Sub-Saharan countries (Namibia, 6th and Rwanda, 7th, one country from Eastern Europe (the new entrant to the top 10, Lithuania, 8th), and another two Western European countries (Ireland, 9th, and Switzerland, 10th, another country in the top-10 for the first time).There is a relatively equitable distribution of available income, resources, and opportunities for men and women in these countries. The tremendous gender gaps are identified primarily in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
Here, we can discuss the overall global gender gap scores across the index’s four main components : Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.
The indicators of the four main components are
(1) Economic Participation and Opportunity:
o Labour force participation rate,
o wage equality for similar work,
o estimated earned income,
o Legislators, senior officials, and managers,
o Professional and technical workers.
(2) Educational Attainment:
o Literacy rate (%)
o Enrollment in primary education (%)
o Enrollment in secondary education (%)
o Enrollment in tertiary education (%).
(3) Health and Survival:
o Sex ratio at birth (%)
o Healthy life expectancy (years).
(4) Political Empowerment:
o Women in Parliament (%)
o Women in Ministerial positions (%)
o Years with a female head of State (last 50 years)
o The share of tenure years.
The objective is to shed light on which factors are driving the overall average decline in the global gender gap score. The analysis results show that this year’s decline is mainly caused by a reversal in performance on the Political Empowerment gap.
Global Trends and Outcomes:
– Globally, this year, i.e., 2021, the average distance completed to gender parity gap is 68% (This means that the remaining gender gap to close stands at 32%) a step back compared to 2020 (-0.6 percentage points). These figures are mainly driven by a decline in the performance of large countries. On its current trajectory, it will now take 135.6 years to close the gender gap worldwide.
– The gender gap in Political Empowerment remains the largest of the four gaps tracked, with only 22% closed to date, having further widened since the 2020 edition of the report by 2.4 percentage points. Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 Parliament seats and 22.6% of over 3,400 Ministers worldwide. In 81 countries, there has never been a woman head of State as of January 15, 2021. At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.
– The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity remains the second-largest of the four key gaps tracked by the index. According to this year’s index results, 58% of this gap has been closed so far. The gap has seen marginal improvement since the 2020 edition of the report, and as a result, we estimate that it will take another 267.6 years to close.
– Gender gaps in Educational Attainment and Health and Survival are nearly closed. In Educational Attainment, 95% of this gender gap has been closed globally, with 37 countries already attaining gender parity. However, the ‘last mile’ of progress is proceeding slowly. The index estimates that it will take another 14.2 years to close this gap on its current trajectory completely.
In Health and Survival, 96% of this gender gap has been closed, registering a marginal decline since last year (not due to COVID-19), and the time to close this gap remains undefined. For both education and health, while progress is higher than economy and politics in the global data, there are important future implications of disruptions due to the pandemic and continued variations in quality across income, geography, race, and ethnicity.
India-Specific Findings:
India had slipped 28 spots to rank 140 out of the 156 countries covered. The pandemic causing a disproportionate impact on women jeopardizes rolling back the little progress made in the last decades-forcing more women to drop off the workforce and leaving them vulnerable to domestic violence.
India’s poor performance on the Global Gender Gap report card hints at a serious wake-up call and learning lessons from the Nordic region for the Government and policy makers.
Within the 156 countries covered, women hold only 26 percent of Parliamentary seats and 22 percent of Ministerial positions. India, in some ways, reflects this widening gap, where the number of Ministers declined from 23.1 percent in 2019 to 9.1 percent in 2021. The number of women in Parliament stands low at 14.4 percent. In India, the gender gap has widened to 62.5 %, down from 66.8% the previous year.
It is mainly due to women’s inadequate representation in politics, technical and leadership roles, a decrease in women’s labor force participation rate, poor healthcare, lagging female to male literacy ratio, and income inequality.
The gap is the widest on the political empowerment dimension, with economic participation and opportunity being next in line. However, the gap on educational attainment and health and survival has been practically bridged.
India is the third-worst performer among South Asian countries, with Pakistan and Afghanistan trailing and Bangladesh being at the top. The report states that the country fared the worst in political empowerment, regressing from 23.9% to 9.1%.
Its ranking on the health and survival dimension is among the five worst performers. The economic participation and opportunity gap saw a decline of 3% compared to 2020, while India’s educational attainment front is in the 114th position.
India has deteriorated to 51st place from 18th place in 2020 on political empowerment. Still, it has slipped to 155th position from 150th position in 2020 on health and survival, 151st place in economic participation and opportunity from 149th place, and 114th place for educational attainment from 112th.
In 2020 reports, among the 153 countries studied, India is the only country where the economic gender gap of 64.6% is larger than the political gender gap of 58.9%. In 2021 report, among the 156 countries, the economic gender gap of India is 67.4%, 3.8% gender gap in education, 6.3% gap in health and survival, and 72.4% gender gap in political empowerment. In health and survival, the gender gap of the sex ratio at birth is above 9.1%, and healthy life expectancy is almost the same.
Discrimination against women has also been reflected in Health and Survival subindex statistics. With 93.7% of this gap closed to date, India ranks among the bottom five countries in this subindex. The wide sex ratio at birth gaps is due to the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices. Besides, more than one in four women has faced intimate violence in her lifetime.The gender gap in the literacy rate is above 20.1%.
Yet, gender gaps persist in literacy : one-third of women are illiterate (34.2%) than 17.6% of men. In political empowerment, globally, women in Parliament is at 128th position and gender gap of 83.2%, and 90% gap in a Ministerial position. The gap in wages equality for similar work is above 51.8%. On health and survival, four large countries Pakistan, India, Vietnam, and China, fare poorly, with millions of women there not getting the same access to health as men.
The pandemic has only slowed down in its tracks the progress India was making towards achieving gender parity. The country urgently needs to focus on “health and survival,” which points towards a skewed sex ratio because of the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices and women’s economic participation. Women’s labour force participation rate and the share of women in technical roles declined in 2020, reducing the estimated earned income of women, one-fifth of men.
Learning from the Nordic region, noteworthy participation of women in politics, institutions, and public life is the catalyst for transformational change. Women need to be equal participants in the labour force to pioneer the societal changes the world needs in this integral period of transition.
Every effort must be directed towards achieving gender parallelism by facilitating women in leadership and decision-making positions. Social protection programmes should be gender-responsive and account for the differential needs of women and girls. Research and scientific literature also provide unequivocal evidence that countries led by women are dealing with the pandemic more effectively than many others.
Gendered inequality, thereby, is a global concern. India should focus on targeted policies and earmarked public and private investments in care and equalized access. Women are not ready to wait for another century for equality. It’s time India accelerates its efforts and fight for an inclusive, equal, global recovery.
India will not fully develop unless both women and men are equally supported to reach their full potential. There are risks, violations, and vulnerabilities women face just because they are women. Most of these risks are directly linked to women’s economic, political, social, and cultural disadvantages in their daily lives. It becomes acute during crises and disasters.
With the prevalence of gender discrimination, and social norms and practices, women become exposed to the possibility of child marriage, teenage pregnancy, child domestic work, poor education and health, sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence. Many of these manifestations will not change unless women are valued more.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]2021 WEF Global Gender Gap report, which confirmed its 2016 finding of a decline in worldwide progress towards gender parity.
Over 2.8 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. As many as 104 countries still have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs, 59 countries have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace, and it is astonishing that a handful of countries still allow husbands to legally stop their wives from working.
Globally, women’s participation in the labour force is estimated at 63% (as against 94% of men who participate), but India’s is at a dismal 25% or so currently. Most women are in informal and vulnerable employment—domestic help, agriculture, etc—and are always paid less than men.
Recent reports from Assam suggest that women workers in plantations are paid much less than men and never promoted to supervisory roles. The gender wage gap is about 24% globally, and women have lost far more jobs than men during lockdowns.
The problem of gender disparity is compounded by hurdles put up by governments, society and businesses: unequal access to social security schemes, banking services, education, digital services and so on, even as a glass ceiling has kept leadership roles out of women’s reach.
Yes, many governments and businesses had been working on parity before the pandemic struck. But the global gender gap, defined by differences reflected in the social, political, intellectual, cultural and economic attainments or attitudes of men and women, will not narrow in the near future without all major stakeholders working together on a clear agenda—that of economic growth by inclusion.
The WEF report estimates 135 years to close the gap at our current rate of progress based on four pillars: educational attainment, health, economic participation and political empowerment.
India has slipped from rank 112 to 140 in a single year, confirming how hard women were hit by the pandemic. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two Asian countries that fared worse.
Here are a few things we must do:
One, frame policies for equal-opportunity employment. Use technology and artificial intelligence to eliminate biases of gender, caste, etc, and select candidates at all levels on merit. Numerous surveys indicate that women in general have a better chance of landing jobs if their gender is not known to recruiters.
Two, foster a culture of gender sensitivity. Take a review of current policies and move from gender-neutral to gender-sensitive. Encourage and insist on diversity and inclusion at all levels, and promote more women internally to leadership roles. Demolish silos to let women grab potential opportunities in hitherto male-dominant roles. Work-from-home has taught us how efficiently women can manage flex-timings and productivity.
Three, deploy corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds for the education and skilling of women and girls at the bottom of the pyramid. CSR allocations to toilet building, the PM-Cares fund and firms’ own trusts could be re-channelled for this.
Four, get more women into research and development (R&D) roles. A study of over 4,000 companies found that more women in R&D jobs resulted in radical innovation. It appears women score far higher than men in championing change. If you seek growth from affordable products and services for low-income groups, women often have the best ideas.
Five, break barriers to allow progress. Cultural and structural issues must be fixed. Unconscious biases and discrimination are rampant even in highly-esteemed organizations. Establish fair and transparent human resource policies.
Six, get involved in local communities to engage them. As Michael Porter said, it is not possible for businesses to sustain long-term shareholder value without ensuring the welfare of the communities they exist in. It is in the best interest of enterprises to engage with local communities to understand and work towards lowering cultural and other barriers in society. It will also help connect with potential customers, employees and special interest groups driving the gender-equity agenda and achieve better diversity.