Female labour has been an important segment of the workforce of India. With the changing socio-economic scenario, women's productive roles have assumed new dimensions. The observance of the International Women's Year in the last quarter of the 20th century, was a historic landmark in the calendar of women's progress. Frankly speaking, it was in recognition of crucial importance and need that women's participation has always been necessary for the success of social and economic development. Over the years, the main objective of the policies of the Government of India with regard to female labour has been to remove the handicaps under which they work, to strengthen their bargaining capacity, to improve their wages and working conditions, to augment their skills and to open up better employment facilities for them.

Unorganised Women Labour in India , contains eleven contributions of eminent writers including one contribution of the editor. This book examines the entire gamut of issues relating to women labourers, covering problems, development perspectives and policies. The book presents a dispassionate analysis of the various issues at stake, their implications, particularly in the context of Indian economy. The book will be immensely useful to the labour administrators, planners, researchers and policymakers.

The last available census estimated around 10 per cent of total urban working women in India are concentrated in the low paid domestic services such as cleaning, cooking, and taking care of the children and the elderly. This is found to be much higher in certain parts of India, emerging as the single most important avenue for urban females, surpassing males in the service since the 1980s. By applying an imaginative and refreshing mix of disciplinary approaches ranging from economic models of the household, empirical analysis and literary conventions, this book analyses the changing labour economy in post-partition West Bengal. It explains how and why women and girl children have replaced this traditionally male bias in the gender segregated domestic service industry since the late 1940s, and addresses the question of whether this increase in vulnerable individuals working in domestic service, the growth of the urban professional middle class in the post liberalization period, and the increasing incidences of reported abuses of domestics, in urban middleclass homes in the recent years, are related. Covering five decades of the history of gender and labour in India, this book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of gender and labour relations, development studies, economics, history, and women and gender studies.

Samita Sen's history of labouring women in Calcutta in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries considers how social constructions of gender shaped their lives. Dr Sen demonstrates how - in contrast to the experience of their male counterparts - the long-term trends in the Indian economy devalued women's labour, establishing patterns of urban migration and changing gender equations within the family. She relates these trends to the spread of dowry, enforced widowhood and child marriage. The book provides insight into the lives of poor urban women who were often perceived as prostitutes or social pariahs. Even trade unions refused to address their problems and they remained on the margins of organized political protest. The study will make a signficant contribution to the understanding of the social and economic history of colonial India and to notions of gender construction.

Produced from the LABORDOC database, lists 953 English-language publications, technical reports, working papers and other documents, produced at ILO headquarters or in ILO field offices, or prepared in connection with ILO programmes.

This important and comprehensive volume vividly depicts the current status of women and girls in West Bengal. The analysis has been conducted in the framework of the socio-economic and politico-cultural ambience that has characterized the state in recent decades. The contributors highlight both areas of strength and vulnerability and clearly demonstrate that the status of women cannot be conceived as monolithic or static--it has many facets and is in a state of constant flux. The analysis of macro data is supported by revealing micro studies based on field surveys and an examination of cultural trends.

The studies assembled in this volume are aimed at analysing the structure of women's labour force participation in India