This paper examines the determinants of female labor force participation in India, against the backdrop of India having one of the lowest participation rates for women among peer countries. Using extensive Indian household survey data, we model the labor force participation choices of women, conditional on demographic characteristics and education, as well as looking at the influence of state-level labor market flexibility and other state policies. Our main finding is that a number of policy initiatives can help boost female economic participation in the states of India, including increased labor market flexibility, investment in infrastructure, and enhanced social spending.

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.

""Discusses the role of women workers who are joining the workforce in the cityscape and bringing to surface the contradictions that this assumption offers"--Provided by publisher"--

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.

In a compelling study of Indian women, Geraldine Forbes considers their recent history from the nineteenth century under colonial rule to the twentieth century after Independence. She begins with the reform movement, established by men to educate women, and demonstrates how education changed women's lives enabling them to take part in public life. Through their own accounts of their lives and activities, she documents the formation of their organisations, their participation in the struggle for freedom, their role in the colonial economy and the development of the women's movement in India since 1947.

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.

The brick factory work is seasonal and the employment is contractual, utterly insecure and wage is piece-rated. Though women workers comprise about one-half of the total workforce in every factory, they hail from the families that survive by working as labourer in every conceivable sense; they are from lower caste and class, illiterate and they are mostly wives of male factory workers. While husbands of those women are not necessarily confined to unskilled factory works women really are. Women are in plethora those works, which are unskilled in nature and where wage earning is comparatively low. Workers after hard day’s toil receive wage that is barest minimum for subsistence. This is why workers are compelled to work along with other family members and as long in a day as they can. Women workers (and others) are deprived of all statutory benefits and amenities like maternity benefits, creche, fixed working hour etc. Even basic minimum welfare provisions like rest shed, drinking water and toilet are conspicuously absent in brick factories. Though owners are amassing whooping profit, they have persistently ignored and evaded the welfare provisions for the workers that are applicable to the factory. Given the nature of skill attainment of the workers, the employment opportunity available in the unorganised sector and insipid role of trade union, there seems no immediate escaping from the bondage and tethering of back-bending work, subsistence wage, insecure job and debasing working conditions.

This book probes into the beedi industry, a highly gendered and class-divided unorganised sector in India. It introduces an analysis of the lives, health status and work of the Indian women and girl children in the industry and discusses the role of gender constructions, global capitalism, and global racism in shaping the ideologies and conceptions about men and women at work. The volume presents a gendered postcolonial perspective on women's employment in the context of social and economic processes that are critical to globalization. It focuses on Telangana's Nizamabad district - where a majority of the women population are employed in the beedi industry. Through detailed surveys and case studies, the author analyses different aspects of exploitation of these women such as poor working conditions, income inequalities, health risks and the realities of child labour in the process of beedi making. Richly detailed, this book will be of great interest to students, researchers and teachers of geography, particularly human geography and feminist geography, women and gender studies, feminism, labour economics, capitalism, development studies, political sociology, and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to gender and feminist geographers, occupational health professionals, NGOs, and those interested in the issues of gender and development.

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.