https://countercurrents.org/2022/03/rural-and-urban-women-hit-hardest-by-covid-induced-unemployment/
The case of the ‘missing women’, i.e. women dropping out employment, that has worried political observers and demographers, so abjectly brazen and transparent, is one such example. The consulting firm, Dalberg, in a rare survey, discovered that almost 43 per cent of the labour force of women had simply disappeared from the unorganised informal economy. In terms of labour force participation, even in the capital of India just about 5 per cent female labour force was participating in the market as compared to almost 60 per cent of men.
At the current rate, it is possible that almost 140 million people have no jobs, and this includes professionals in the affluent corporate sector in urban areas. Unemployment has sharply risen to almost 12 per cent in recent times due to the pandemic and its devastating consequences. The Centre has left the people to their fate, even while the states have been given the sole responsibility to handle the current crisis.
A survey by the Pew Research Center discovered a ‘deep recession’ in 2020; the middle class had stunningly depleted by 32 million, pushing them from their reasonable comfort zones into the hard margins of low income groups. Almost 75 million people have fallen into poverty in India, mostly migrant and unorganised labour, a majority of them without fundamental rights, while most of them are Dalits, adivasis and extremely poor Muslims. Of these people on the margins, the majority are women, invisible, ghettoised, and now compulsively pushed outside the economy. Just about 19 per female workforce have jobs in the current scenario, while almost 50 per cent have been rendered jobless. They constitute the large number of unaccounted missing women.
04/03/2022