Demographics & Society · March 2026
From Too Many to Too Few: How India Quietly Stopped Worrying About Its Population — and Started Worrying About Something Else
For decades, India was told its greatest threat was too many people. Now its fertility rate has dropped below the level needed to replace the population. The country that once sterilised millions in a panic is now debating whether it has enough children. The story of how that happened is more complicated — and more human — than either alarm would suggest.
There is a photograph that circulates occasionally in Indian demographic circles — grainy, black-and-white, dated somewhere in the mid-1970s. It shows a government camp in rural north India: a row of cots, men lying still, and a banner overhead that reads, in Hindi, “Small Family, Happy Family.” The men had just undergone vasectomies. Some came voluntarily, drawn by the offer of cash and a transistor radio. Others, by numerous accounts, did not come entirely of their own choosing.
That photograph belongs to one of the most troubling episodes in post-independence India — the forced sterilisation drives of the Emergency years, 1975 to 1977. Men and women in certain states were rounded up, pressured, or incentivised into permanent sterilisation. The government tracked numbers. It handed out prizes to districts with the highest “couple protection rates.” It treated human reproduction as a logistical problem to be solved by a determined administration.
Half a century later, India’s problem looks completely different. The country’s total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime — has fallen to 1.9. That number sits below 2.1, which is the replacement rate, the minimum needed for a population to sustain itself across generations without immigration. India is, in other words, no longer producing enough children to replace itself. The country that once panicked about too many babies is now, in certain circles, beginning to quietly panic about too few.
How did this happen? And what does it mean? Two recent publications — a reflective essay by Bangladeshi public health leader Mushtaque Chowdhury, and a population projection report by the International Institute of Migration and Development and the Population Foundation — offer complementary answers. Together, they trace one of the most consequential and least understood policy journeys in modern Indian history.
I. The Bomb That Wasn’t
To understand where India’s population anxiety came from, you have to travel back to 1968 and a book called The Population Bomb, written by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. The book was a bestseller of a particular kind: urgent, terrifying, and, as it turned out, mostly wrong.
What Is Neo-Malthusianism?
The Theory Behind the Panic
In 1798, an English clergyman named Thomas Malthus argued that human populations grow faster than food supply — and that famine, disease, and war were nature’s way of correcting the imbalance. “Neo-Malthusianism” is the modern revival of that idea: the belief that too many people, especially in poor countries, will overwhelm available resources and cause civilisational collapse. Ehrlich’s Population Bomb was its most famous expression. The theory has been heavily criticised — food production has largely kept pace with population growth through technology and trade — but it had enormous influence on Western aid policy and on governments in India that were dependent on Western donors in the 1960s and 70s.
Ehrlich painted apocalyptic scenes of a “population tsunami” in developing countries — mass starvation, social collapse, civilisational overload. The book terrified Western policymakers. It also gave intellectual cover to those who believed the solution lay in controlling the reproduction of people in poorer nations — a project that Western governments and foundations were willing to fund generously, as long as other countries bore its consequences.
In India, this agenda found a willing champion in Sripati Chandrasekhar, a demographer and sociologist who served as the country’s health minister in 1967. Chandrasekhar established a full department of family planning, pushed a “cafeteria approach” to fertility control — offering a menu of contraceptive options to women — and launched sterilisation drives across the country. He raised the legal age of marriage. He persuaded Parliament. He built a bureaucratic apparatus whose entire purpose was to reduce the number of Indians being born.
During the Emergency of 1975 to 1977, sterilisation targets were set at the district level and passed down through the bureaucracy like production quotas in a factory. States competed for awards. Officials cut corners, used pressure, and looked away when consent was not freely given. In some states, men were told they could not receive government services — ration cards, land records, loans — without being sterilised. The numbers were, by official count, impressive. The human cost was vast and unevenly borne, falling most heavily on the poor, the rural, and those with the least power to refuse.
II. The Study That Was Too Good to Be True
While Ehrlich was writing his ‘bomb’, something quieter and more careful was being done in Khanna, a village in Punjab. A team from Harvard University, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, had been running one of the world’s first large-scale family planning trials: offering contraceptive advice and supplies to married women, tracking uptake and birth rates over years. The results looked remarkable. High rates of “acceptance” among participants. The study became a landmark in global family planning advocacy, cited in journals and in donor reports.
There was just one problem. Acceptance and practice turned out to be very different things. The birth rates in Khanna didn’t change.
An anthropologist named Mahmood Mamdani — whose son, recently became the Mayor of New York — went back to Khanna and asked a simpler question: why did families who said yes to contraception keep having children? The answer he found was not ignorance or indifference. It was calculation. Poor farming families in Punjab needed children — to work the land, to support parents in old age, to offset the near-certainty that some children would not survive to adulthood. Children were not a problem to be solved. They were a rational economic response to a life with no other safety net.
Mamdani’s finding pointed to something that Western-funded family planning programmes were structurally unable to see: you cannot change fertility rates by distributing contraceptives to people whose lives make large families entirely sensible. The change has to come from somewhere deeper — from economic security, from the education of girls, from falling infant mortality, from a world in which a family can afford to have fewer children because it trusts that the ones it has will survive.
III. “Development Is the Best Contraceptive”
In 1974, India’s health minister at the time, Karan Singh, stood at the World Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania, and said something that became one of the most quoted lines in the history of global demography: “Development is the best contraceptive.“
It was a rebuke to the Western population-control agenda — a statement that poor countries’ birth rates would fall not through coercion or external pressure but through the same process that had already driven birth rates down in the West: education, healthcare, women’s economic participation, and rising living standards. India, Singh was saying, did not have a population problem. It had a poverty problem. Solve the second and the first would take care of itself.
What Is the Demographic Transition?
The Pattern Every Developing Country Follows
The demographic transition is a pattern observed in virtually every country that has industrialised. It has four stages: first, birth rates and death rates are both high (many children born, many die young). Second, death rates fall as medicine improves, but birth rates remain high — population grows quickly. Third, birth rates begin to fall as people get richer, women get educated, and children cost more than they earn. Fourth, birth and death rates are both low — the population stabilises or begins to shrink. India has moved through stages two and three faster than expected, and parts of the country are now entering stage four.
The proof came from India’s own south. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka — states that invested heavily in female literacy, infant healthcare, and economic development — all saw their birth rates collapse without any coercive intervention. Kerala reached replacement fertility in 1988, when the national average was still a child-per-woman higher. Tamil Nadu followed in 1993. Today, Maharashtra’s fertility rate is lower than Norway’s.
The contrast with northern states — which won national awards for high “couple protection rates” while continuing to show stubbornly elevated birth rates — was stark. Handing out contraceptives had not worked. Sending girls to school had.
IV. The Numbers Now
India’s national TFR today stands at 1.9 — below the replacement rate of 2.1 for the first time in recorded history. The country’s fertility fell from nearly five children per woman at independence, to around three in the 1990s, to under two today. The number of babies born in India annually peaked at around 29 million at the turn of the millennium and has been falling since.
India’s Fertility — The Numbers at a Glance
- National TFR (2023): 1.9 — below replacement level of 2.1
- Urban TFR: 1.6 | Rural TFR: 2.1
- Lowest state: Sikkim — 1.1
- Highest state: Bihar — 3.0
- TFR for women with no schooling: 3.3 | TFR for literate women: 1.8
- 18 states and UTs are now below replacement level
- Population projected to rise from 1.36 billion (2021) to 1.59 billion (2051), then plateau and decline
- Lancet projection: TFR could fall to 1.29 by 2050
But these national figures hide a fault line that is shaping Indian politics with increasing intensity. The southern states — Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana — have had below-replacement fertility for decades. Their populations are ageing, their workforces are shrinking, and their governments are already thinking about how to support growing numbers of elderly residents. Andhra Pradesh’s Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu recently announced his government is exploring a law to incentivise families to have more children — a striking position in a country that spent decades doing the opposite.
The northern states — Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh — still have TFRs above 2.5 in rural areas. Their populations are younger, their workforces are still growing, and they contribute disproportionately to India’s national headcount. Under the current system of parliamentary representation, seats are allocated based on population. When the delimitation exercise — the redrawing of constituency boundaries — eventually happens, states that kept their birth rates high will gain seats. States that reduced theirs will lose them. The south, which did what the national family planning programme asked, may be politically penalised for its success. It is perhaps the most perverse incentive structure in Indian democratic history.
V. The Ageing Country in Waiting
A projection report by the International Institute of Migration and Development and the Population Foundation, led by demographers S. Irudaya Rajan and J. Retnakumar, maps what India’s population will look like between now and 2051. The picture it draws is not of explosion or collapse, but of a slow, structural transformation whose consequences will be felt in every sector of public life.
India’s population will continue to grow — from 1.36 billion in 2021 to approximately 1.59 billion in 2051 — but the pace slows sharply. The annual growth rate of 0.5 percent is about a third of what it was during the high-fertility decades.
More importantly, the composition changes radically. The share of children in India’s population — already halved from 40 percent in the 1960s to 20 percent today — will continue to fall. The share of people over 60 will nearly double, reaching over 20 percent of the population by 2050. In Kerala alone, the elderly will constitute 25 percent of the state’s population by 2036.
What Is the Demographic Dividend? (Simply Explained)
The Window That Opens — and Closes
The demographic dividend is the economic boost that happens when a large share of a country’s population is of working age — neither very young (needing to be supported as children) nor very old (needing pensions and healthcare). With more workers than dependents, savings rise, productivity grows, and economies accelerate. China’s rapid growth in the 1980s–2000s was partly driven by its demographic dividend. India is currently in the middle of this window. The problem is that windows close. Once the working-age population starts ageing without a sufficient supply of young workers to replace them — as is already happening in south India — the dividend reverses into a burden. Japan is the most extreme example: it has more elderly citizens than children and an economy that has struggled with stagnation for decades.
India’s working-age population is expected to keep growing until 2041, which means the demographic dividend — the economic advantage of having more workers than dependents — is still available to harvest. But it will not wait indefinitely. The window is open. It will not stay that way.
The challenge is compounded by technology. Artificial intelligence and automation are eliminating the kinds of jobs — routine manufacturing, data processing, basic administrative work — that countries at India’s stage of development have historically used to absorb large numbers of young workers and generate the savings that fund industrialisation.
The jobs that automation cannot easily replace are in human-facing services: healthcare, teaching, social work, elder care. These are precisely the sectors where India’s growing elderly population will create the greatest demand. The demographic and technological challenges, read together, point to the same answer: invest in training a large health and care workforce.
VI. What the Policy Should Look Like Now
For most of independent India’s history, population policy meant one thing: getting the numbers down. The language of “couple protection rates,” of targets, of “cafeteria approaches” to contraception — all of it was oriented toward subtraction. The success of that project, paradoxically, has now made it obsolete. India no longer needs to reduce its birth rate. It needs to manage the consequences of a birth rate that has already fallen — and fallen faster, in some places, than anyone planned for.
What this means in practice is a shift in the entire purpose of population-related policy — from controlling numbers to improving the quality of life of the people who exist. This involves several things that India has historically underinvested in.
The New Policy Agenda — What Needs to Change
- From population control to population health. Policy energy should shift toward keeping people well at every stage of life — maternal and child health, chronic disease in middle age, mental health, elder care.
- Malnutrition in all its forms. India still carries a heavy burden of both under-nutrition in children and over-nutrition (obesity, diabetes) in adults. Both require attention across the entire lifecycle.
- Ageing infrastructure. Health systems built to handle infectious diseases and childbirth need to be expanded to handle the ailments of an older population: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, disability.
- Health workforce as employment. Since India’s working-age population won’t peak until 2041, there is still time to train a large corps of doctors, nurses, paramedics, and community health workers — creating jobs and addressing a chronic shortage simultaneously.
- Climate and pandemic readiness. Large populations remain ecologically significant. Expanding human settlements erases natural barriers between ecosystems, increasing the risk of zoonotic disease spillovers. Population health and environmental health are linked.
There is also the question of ecology — one that both publications flag and that rarely enters the demographic debate in India. Even a slower-growing population of 1.59 billion people places enormous demands on land, water, food, and energy.
The pressure on natural ecosystems — the forests, wetlands, and wild corridors that buffer human settlements from the microbes and climate shifts beyond them — does not diminish simply because birth rates have fallen. The absolute number still matters.
There is a particular kind of historical irony in the fact that Singapore and South Korea— two of the Asian economies that most aggressively pursued population control programmes in the 1970s and 80s — are now paying couples cash bonuses to have more children. The incentives have simply reversed. The anxiety has simply reversed. The bureaucratic apparatus that once tracked how many people could be prevented from being born now tracks how many can be encouraged into existence.
India is not at that point yet, and may never reach it at the national level. Its demography is too large and too uneven for a single policy lever to work everywhere. But the direction of travel is clear: the old language of the population bomb — of targets and drives and “protection rates” — belongs to a chapter that is now closed.
The question now is not how many Indians there will be, but what kind of country those Indians will grow old in.
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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.