Abstract
There is a broad agreement that India’s north-eastern region (NER) is relatively better off in gender-based development parameters. That being so, we should expect advantageous labour market outcomes as far as the female workforce is concerned. Using unit-level data from the National Sample Survey (NSS) 2011–2012, and the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2019–2020, this paper assesses gender equality in the region by focusing on labour market participation, a crucial aspect of women’s empowerment. The above holds importance in the backdrop of reduced female labour force participation rates in India experienced in the last decade, as well as the overall complexities of NER’s labour market, characterised by multiple long-term challenges, including its unique geographical position, susceptibility to natural calamities, insurgency, cross-border tensions, and internal political conflicts. Our findings highlight a pronounced and widening gender gap in the labour market indicators of NER compared to the rest of India. The female unemployment rate is much higher in the region than in the rest of India, indicating both supply-side constraints and the inability to create suitable jobs. We also find wide variation across the eight north-eastern states concerning their performance in key labour market indicators, indicating the need to adopt state-specific policies. Our paper further looks into the structure and nature of employment for male and female workers in the NER, which reflects increased precarity of work conditions for females.
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Notes
The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy’s (CMIE) Consumer Pyramid Household Surveys (CPHS) have emerged as an important regular source of labour market statistics in in the past decade. Thus, with the release of annual PLFS surveys since 2017–18 there is currently an overlap between the official datasets and CMIE datasets. However, we have not used CPHS data for this analysis as NSS-EUS is more comparable with PLFS. It is found that while employment estimates for men are broadly comparable between PLFS and CPHS, those for women show a consistent divergence. CMIE estimates of women’s WPR is lower than that of PLFS irrespective of the reference period used. Further all kinds of economic activities of women are equally likely to not be captured by CPHS (Abraham & Shrivastava, 2022).
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Bordoloi, M., Bedamatta, R. Gender Gap in the Labour Market of India’s North-east: 2011–2012 to 2019–2020. Ind. J. Labour Econ. 65, 1083–1098 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-022-00414-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-022-00414-5