Climate & Food Security · March 2026
India’s unfolding food-insecurity.
A landmark new study ranks India among the most food-insecure large economies in a warming world — and finds that economic growth alone will not be enough to hold the line. The numbers are stark. The window to act is narrowing.
In the wheat fields of Punjab and Haryana, February is normally a forgiving month — cool enough for grain to fill steadily before the spring harvest. February 2025 was India’s hottest February in 124 years. A farmer in the region told researchers he normally harvests 18 quintals of wheat per acre. That year, he got eight. “The heat all but destroyed not just wheat, but crops like potato and mustard, too. Barely anything survived,” he said.
This is not an isolated story. It is a preview. A major new study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), published in March 2026, has for the first time mapped food security across 162 countries against warming scenarios of 1.5°C, 2°C, and 4°C — and its findings for India are among the most alarming in the world for a large economy.
I. The Index and What It Says
The IIED Food Security Index measures four things: whether enough food is available, whether people can afford it, whether it is nutritious enough to sustain health, and whether the food system is sustainable enough to survive repeated shocks. Together, these four pillars produce a score from 0 to 10. The global average is 6.74.
India scores 5.31 at baseline — already well below the global average, and behind fellow large emerging economies Brazil (6.72), Mexico (6.36), and Indonesia (5.87). But the study is not about where countries stand today. It is about where they are going.
Under 1.5°C of global warming — the aspirational limit of the Paris Agreement — India’s score falls to 4.96.
Under 2°C, it falls further to 4.52. The trajectory is not gradual or gentle. It is a sustained, measurable decline in the ability of a country of 1.4 billion people to feed itself adequately, predictably, and nutritiously.
India on the IIED Food Security Index — By the Numbers
- Baseline score: 5.31 (global average: 6.74)
- At 1.5°C warming: 4.96
- At 2°C warming: 4.52
- Comparators: Brazil 6.72 | Mexico 6.36 | Indonesia 5.87 | China 7.62
- Highest scorers: Iceland (9.26), Denmark (9.17), Austria (9.15)
- At 2°C globally: an additional 291 million people could fall below the average food security threshold
- 59% of humanity already lives in countries below the global average score
China, with a considerably stronger baseline score of 7.62, is also projected to see its food security decline — to 7.06 at 2°C.
Even among G7 countries, none rank in the global top five, and all are expected to see drops under warming scenarios. The study makes clear this is a global problem. But it also makes clear that the problem is distributed very unequally.
This research shows that, yet again, it’s the poorest countries with the least responsibility for climate change which will suffer its worst effects. But crucially this work also provides tools for understanding the possible impacts and potential solutions in detail.
II. What Warming Actually Does to Indian Fields
India’s two great staple crops — wheat and rice — are both acutely temperature-sensitive. The Ministry of Earth Sciences and India Meteorological Department have projected that climate change will reduce rice and wheat production by 6 to 10 percent. That figure is from the government’s own models.
Independent projections go further. A 2025 Nature study by the Climate Impact Lab found that under a high-emissions scenario, wheat yield losses of 40 to 100 percent could occur across northern and central India by 2100.
Researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center calculate that a 2.5 to 4.9°C temperature increase could reduce wheat yields by 41 to 52 percent and rice yields by 32 to 40 percent.
These are not tail-risk scenarios. They are central projections from mainstream climate science — and they describe what happens to the food supply of a country where 80 percent of the population depends on government-subsidised grains, and where 1.4 billion people need to be fed every day.
What the Heat Does, Crop by Crop
Wheat: The Grain-Fill Window Is Closing
Wheat is catastrophically sensitive to heat during the grain-filling phase — the two-to-three-week window in spring when the grain forms inside the husk. Temperatures above 35°C during this period can reduce yields by up to 20 percent. Rising temperatures in northwest India are compressing this window, and delayed sowing caused by disrupted monsoons pushes crops directly into the heat. February 2025’s record temperatures — the hottest in 124 years — hit at precisely this moment. India’s 2024–25 wheat procurement came in at 26.6 million tonnes, well below the 34.15 million tonnes target.
Rice: Yield Falls, Emissions Rise, Nutrition Drops
South and eastern India face projected rice yield reductions of 8 to 12 percent due to erratic rainfall, salinity intrusion in delta regions, and submergence risks. The problem is compounded by a cruel paradox: rising CO₂ levels that drive warming also reduce the protein, iron, and zinc content of rice grains, deepening what scientists call “hidden hunger” — where caloric intake is adequate but nutritional quality is insufficient to maintain health.
Pulses, Maize, Sugarcane
Global maize yields are expected to decline by as much as 24 percent by 2030. Chickpea production has already declined by up to 45 percent in certain regions under specific climate scenarios. Sugarcane farmers in Uttar Pradesh — a crop that supports the livelihoods of roughly 50 million farmers — report yield drops of up to 30 percent and reduced sugar content from sudden temperature spikes in March.
What makes India’s situation particularly acute is the combination of scale and fragility. The country has 1.4 billion people to feed. Over 65 percent of its farmland is rain-fed, with no guaranteed irrigation — meaning it is directly and immediately exposed to monsoon disruption. It has warmed by approximately 0.7°C since 1901, and the pace of warming is accelerating. And it ranks 105th out of 127 countries in the Global Hunger Index — a baseline of nutritional vulnerability that climate stress can only deepen.
III. Growth Won’t Save You
One of the most consequential findings in the IIED study — and one that should unsettle Indian policymakers — concerns the limits of economic growth as a buffer against food insecurity.
The conventional assumption has been that as India gets richer, it gets safer. Wealthier countries can import food when domestic production fails, can afford better storage and supply chains, can subsidise vulnerable populations through disruptions. The logic is not wrong. But it is incomplete.
The IIED researchers found that each additional $1,000 in per capita GDP translates, on average, to about 0.2 additional points on the food security scale. Useful — but uneven. The gains are weakest precisely where they are most needed: in the sustainability pillar, which measures whether a food system can withstand repeated shocks over time.
Economic growth improves access to food today, but it does not make the food system itself more resilient to the kind of repeated, compounding climate disruptions that are now locked in regardless of what the world does in the next decade.
This insight matters globally as well as for India specifically. Climate shocks in major food-producing regions create price volatility that propagates across international markets — as seen when the Ukraine war disrupted wheat supplies, or when El Niño-linked crop failures tightened global rice availability. A climate-driven collapse in Indian or Chinese food production would not stay within their borders. It would ripple through every import-dependent economy in Asia and Africa.
IV. The People Who Bear the Most
Climate-driven food insecurity in India does not arrive uniformly. It follows the geography of existing inequality — deepening the disadvantages already faced by those with the fewest resources to adapt.
Smallholder farmers — who make up the vast majority of India’s agricultural workforce — have neither the capital nor the landholding size to shift crops, install drip irrigation, or absorb a bad season. Only 43 percent of Adivasi and 40 percent of Dalit farmers cultivate more than 0.6 hectares. Those with smaller holdings have fewer options, lower incomes, and weaker safety nets when a heat wave or a failed monsoon strikes. Research links repeated climate-driven crop failures directly to rising rates of rural mental distress and farmer suicide.
Women bear a disproportionate share of the burden. Their roles in food production, household food allocation, and family nutrition — combined with higher nutritional needs during menstruation, pregnancy, and breastfeeding — make them structurally more exposed to food insecurity when supply contracts or prices rise. When grains lose nutritional quality under elevated CO₂, women and children are typically the first to experience the consequences.
Case Study
Hidden Hunger: The Nutrition Crisis Inside the Calorie Count
When scientists talk about food insecurity in a warming world, they often focus on calories — whether enough food exists to prevent starvation. But the IIED index, and much of the underlying research, points to a second, less visible crisis: declining nutritional quality in the food that does exist.
Elevated atmospheric CO₂ — the same gas driving global warming — interferes directly with plant protein synthesis. Experiments in the US, Japan, and Australia have shown that concentrations of iron, zinc, and protein decrease in wheat, rice, maize, peas, and soybeans when exposed to elevated CO₂ levels. For India, where iron-deficiency anaemia already affects roughly half of all women and children, a further decline in the nutritional quality of the grains that form the backbone of the national diet is not a future risk. It is a present emergency being made measurably worse by every fraction of a degree of additional warming.
The IIED study scores India particularly low on the “utilisation” pillar — the measure of whether the food people eat actually nourishes them adequately. This is not a supply problem that can be solved by growing more grain. It requires a fundamental rethinking of what India grows, and for whom.
V. The Migration Pressure That No One Is Planning For
Food insecurity does not sit still. When farming becomes untenable — when the rains fail three years in a row, when the wheat harvest halves, when the family’s savings drain into failed seasons — people move. Central, northern, and eastern India are projected to lose more agricultural jobs to climate shocks than other regions, and the pressure of rural-to-urban migration is already building.
The problem is that the cities migrants move to are themselves under climate pressure — from urban heat islands, flooding, and water stress. The migration is real, it is already happening, and it is heading toward infrastructure that was not designed to absorb the volumes that warming will produce. Unplanned settlements grow. Social services strain. And the new urban poor are often more food-insecure, not less, than the farming communities they left — because they have traded subsistence agriculture for wage work that vanishes when a city’s economy stumbles.
VI. What Would Actually Help
The IIED study is deliberately not a counsel of despair. Its authors are explicit that catastrophic declines are not inevitable — that the difference between a 1.5°C world and a 2°C world is real and significant, and that adaptation investments made now can reduce the severity of what is coming. What would those investments look like for India?
What Adaptation Looks Like — Practical Priorities
- Heat-tolerant crop varieties. Developing wheat and rice varieties with shorter growth cycles to avoid peak heat windows during flowering and grain-fill. IRRI’s Rice Crop Manager already helps farmers calibrate fertiliser precisely, reducing emissions while maintaining yields.
- Crop diversification. Reducing over-reliance on rice and wheat monocultures in favour of climate-resilient millets, sorghum, and legumes — crops that require less water, tolerate heat better, and carry stronger nutritional profiles.
- Irrigation investment. Expanding access to affordable irrigation for the 65 percent of farmland currently rain-fed — particularly through solar-powered micro-irrigation, which reduces both water demand and energy cost.
- Strategic food reserves. Building and maintaining grain buffer stocks sufficient to absorb one to two failed harvests without immediate market price spikes that hit the poor hardest.
- Strengthening the PDS. Expanding the Public Distribution System to cover nutritionally diverse foods — not just rice and wheat — so that when the climate shrinks one crop, the safety net doesn’t fail with it.
- Soil health. Decades of intensive cultivation have depleted soil fertility across large areas. Restoring soil organic matter improves drought resilience, water retention, and yield stability at minimal cost.
None of these are new ideas. Many have been in policy documents for years. The gap is not between knowing what to do and not knowing. It is between knowing and doing — at the scale, and with the urgency, that the trajectory of warming now demands.
At 2°C of warming — a scenario that is not worst-case but is, by current global emissions trajectories, close to likely — an additional 291 million people worldwide could fall below the food security threshold.
India has achieved remarkable things in agriculture over the past half-century: the Green Revolution, successive record harvests, the feeding of a population that has nearly tripled since independence. But those achievements were built for a stable climate. The next half-century will not have one.
The Punjab farmer who harvested eight quintals of wheat where he expected eighteen is not an outlier in a data set. He is an early signal in a series. The question is whether India’s food system, and the policy architecture around it, is being rebuilt fast enough to receive what comes next.
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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.