Women need to move into areas such as food processing, where employment is growing, Plannning Commission Deputy Chairman, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, said at an ILO event here on Thursday.
“Women are locked into activities that are getting phased out,” he said, without specifying the areas, but admitting that the Government needed to do a lot more to create more jobs for both men and women.
Ahluwalia was participating in a workshop on Women’s Labour Force Participation”, organised by the Labour Ministry and International Labour Organisation (ILO).
According to an ILO study, despite strong economic growth, female labour force participation was falling in India, while it had increased in countries such as Bangladesh and Pakistan. While the ILO study cited the trend of girls opting for education as one reason for this, experts pointed at a grim scenario of no quality jobs even when education was over.
Montek on NSSO data
Meanwhile, Ahluwalia questioned NSSO data on declining female work participation which, he said, did not necessarily reveal “what exactly is happening”.
“It is not sufficient to reach any conclusion about the workforce scenario. I don’t believe that we can come to an unambiguous conclusion on the basis of NSSO data that what exactly is happening”, he said.
According to the NSSO’s 66th round, during 2004-05 to 2009-10, labour force participation rates (LFPR) remained almost the same for rural males but decreased by about 6 percentage points for rural females (from 33 per cent to 26.5 per cent). It said during the period, the rate decreased by about one percentage point for urban males and declined by about 3 percentage points for the urban females (from 17.8 per cent to 14.6 per cent). LFPR is defined as the number of ‘persons days’ in the labour force per 1,000 persons days.
Reacting to Ahluwalia’s statement, a former Government official lamented recent statements “undermining” Government institutions such as NSSO and CSO (on GDP estimates). “Probably a ground is being created to outsource data collection, too,” the official said.