From Towards Equality to Reinforcing Inequality: Processes of Gender De-equalisation

Fifty years after the landmark Towards Equality report, India finds itself at a troubling crossroads. Instead of moving closer to gender justice, we are witnessing what economist and feminist scholar Ritu Dewan calls “gender de-equalisation.” A trailblazer in her own right, she has been President of the Indian Association for Women’s Studies, cofounder of the Feminist Policy Collective, the first woman to head the Department of Economics at the University of Mumbai, and a founder of Asia’s first Centre for Gender Economics. Drawing on decades of scholarship and activism, Dewan shows how progress in political participation, health, education, livelihoods, and safety is now slipping backwards under the weight of regressive policies, shrinking democratic space, and entrenched patriarchy. As the 50th anniversary of the Stree Mukti movement was marked in 2024, her analysis pushes us to reflect on how much of the hard-won progress on equality is now being undone.

The year 1975 is historic internationally, nationally and also regionally: the United Nations announcement as Women’s Year, which was celebrated with the organising of the Stree Mukti Sangharsh Parishad in Maharashtra, and the publication of the Report ‘Towards Equality’ on the Status of Women in India, commissioned by the Government of India. In this context, it is indeed commendable and also valiant that Stree Mukti@50 brings together women’s organisations all over Maharashtra in order to not only revive the spirit of 1975, especially in these increasingly challenging times, but importantly to evaluate and assess where we stand today on the path to gender equality.

‘Towards Equality’ represents commitment to the rights guaranteed in the Constitution of India, going way beyond rhetoric to implementable and actionable recommendations and polices: impeccably argued, rigorously analysed, data-enriched. And multiple aspects of the nature and manifestation of women’s exploitation and oppression are explained elegantly in simple but not simplistic terms. This monumental work, together with the rights guaranteed in India’s Constitution, inspired me to take on the immense challenge of conceiving and helming the India Gender Report 2024, the first of its kind after half a decade. The central focus of the Indi Gender Report is two-fold: one, to analytically identify mainstreamed as well as ‘new’ gendered sectors and sub-sectors which include Financing, Gender Responsive Budgeting, Fiscal and Monetary Policies, Trade etc, and two, to evaluate and scrutinise the extent of fulfilment of gender rights, the levels of attainment achieved, and the advancement of the process of equality, egalitarianism and equity.

This article attempts to present a snapshot of changes in six of the several of the major aspects identified by ‘Towards Equality’, and is additionally located in the context of India’s global rankings: these are Political Participation; Demographics, Health and Wellbeing; Education; Gender and Sexual-based Violence, and Labour and Livelihoods. To this is added the demystification of the ongoing process of institutionalising inequalities via policies and laws. The major constraint, as appears to be the norm in recent times, is the lack of comparable and authentic data, characterised by huge delays and lapses. Trends, however, are clear and all point towards the fact that the process we all had embarked upon towards enhancing and ensuring gender equality has, in several ways, been turned into a regressive process of what I term as “gender de-equalisation”.

POLITICAL PARTICIPATION:

Several legal advances have been made in order to increase the involvement of women in political processes, the two most crucial being the 72nd and 73rd Amendments of 1992 that guaranteed women one-third rights in all panchayats and urban bodies, and the long-awaited Representation of Women in Parliament of 2023. However, women’s political participation appears to be declining rather than expanding. The share of women in the Lok Sabha, which was the highest during 1991-96 has fallen to a low of 18 % since 2019, their share in State Assemblies today averaging merely 9 %. The share of women in central ministers too has fallen by a sharp two percentage points over merely five years, from 11 % in 2019 to less than 9 %. Consequently, today India ranks among the lowest in terms of women’s representation in national parliaments, falling to 143 out of 185 countries and down even further to 149 after the 2024 elections. In comparison, Rwanda records over 61 % representation.

DEMOGRAPHICS, HEALTH & WELLBEING:

The current Sex Ratio is the lowest ever at 933, down from 946 as recorded in India’s first Census after independence in 1951; in fact, 2022 marked the third consecutive year of decline. The Child Sex Ratio is now at a dismal 919. The ratios would be much lower if the STs had not maintained a comparatively better rate of 957. As of today, India ranks 214 out of 236 countries in the Sex Ratio. Life Expectancy in India rose from 50 years in 1975 to 69 years in 2015, before actually falling by two years in 2023: whether this is a result of the rather uncompassionate and gender-blind pandemic policy or the decline in public health services needs to be examined further. As can be seen, women and children appear to have been the worst affected by the current pattern of growth.

While the Maternal Mortality Rate fell to 93 per lakh live births in 2019-21 from 362 in 2000, the rate of decline has been slowing since 2015, the highest ever having occurred during 2005-10. Today, India has the second-highest MMR in the world. A similar trend is observed for Infant Mortality Rate: the sharpest decline ever was in 2013 at -5.04 %, and in 2024 the slowest at -3 %. Child Wasting is stagnant at 20 %, while Child Stunting is at a high of 36 %. The situation has worsened in the last decade, as is recorded by the NFHS Surveys: Child Anaemia has risen from 58 % to 67 % between 2015-16 and 2019-21, with Female Anaemia at an all-time high of a shocking 57 %, reflecting a massive increase by 34 percentage points from 23 % just within a short period of four years. At least 14 % of Indians are undernourished, with India’s rank being 111 of 121 countries in the Global Hunger Index, and has since 2016 been in the ‘serious’ category. Yet ICDS allocations have fallen by over 30% since 2011-12.

EDUCATION:

In 2022, India achieved amongst the highest proportion of women in STEM at 43 %, a commendable female enrolment in Higher Education at almost 50 %, and near universalisation in Elementary Education enrolment. However, what is worrying is that Overall Enrolment has fallen in the last two years, the worst affected being government school enrolment, which showed a sharp decline from 73 % to 66 %. Although this drop has been officially attributed to ‘falling birth rates’, the major reason as reported by numerous researchers examining both secondary as well as primary data based on field-based studies, is the closure of government schools in the name of ‘rationalisation’, even though education is recognised as a public good worldwide. The decline in educational attainment indicators, including a relatively high Gender Literacy Gap of 12.6 percentage points, is one of the several reasons that India’s rank in the Global Gender Gap Index has fallen to 129 out of 146 countries.

GENDER & SEXUAL-BASED VIOLENCE:

Nothing could reflect the declining status of women in our nation more than the fact that India today has been identified as the world’s most dangerous country for women, an ‘achievement’ it had started gaining in 2018 when it was ranked as the fourth most dangerous. In the Global Peace Index, India stands at 126 of 163, mainly due to a rise in domestic violence. The short 5-year period between the two latest NFHS reports a massive rise in Spousal Violence: from 21 % in NFHS-4 to 45 % NFHS-5. The highest increase is in Uttar Pradesh at 171 %. The NCRB too records that crimes against women have risen by 13 % every year since 2018: the maximum in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan, with most complaints in Maharashtra and Delhi. At this point, it is both instructive and crucial to note that the least crimes against women are in Jammu & Kashmir, and Kerala.

This huge rise in crimes against especially women is, I strongly believe, a direct reflection if not the outcome of the quite deliberate macro process of turning a blind eye, to put it mildly, towards those who commit these crimes including by celebrating the release of rapists; granting them regular bail; ignoring and dismissing of violations of especially the marginalised and vulnerable sections…...the list of illustrations and incidents is indeed long. What we have today is thus not only actualisation but also normalisation, internalisation and sometimes even justification of violence.

LABOUR and LIVELIHOODS:

India’s labour structure has undergone several fundamental changes in recent times due to the combined massive negative impacts of several policies: low value-added growth; centralisation of capital; monetisation and disinvestment; focus on non-labour intensive sectors; economic slowdown; prioritising profits over wages; cuts in critical public investment; the demonetisation of 2016 which threw almost the entire informal sector which employs over 90 % of workers into structural turmoil from which it is yet to recover; the somewhat chaotic and ill-planned implementation of GST; the national COVID-induced lockdown with a mere 4-hour notice and thereafter the lack of an empathic pandemic policy. One of the major consequences is the process of reverse migration, as well as a rise in unemployment and a resurgence of what is termed as disguised employment.

Employment patterns changed dramatically after 2017-18, the year which reflects the direct impact of demonetisation: by 2022-23, Casual and Regular employment were almost equal, though at significantly lower levels, with only the Self-employed category expanding. This period also saw a huge rise in the proportion of workers in the agricultural sector from 52 % to over 58 %, a process that is contrary to all historical development experiences of all countries. Rural India, therefore, appears to have emerged as the refuge for all those thrown out of the labour market, whether formal or informal, with petty production being the only source of survival.

At this point, it is essential to de-mystify the oft-touted term much in use today – ‘entrepreneurship’. Self-employment is not ‘entrepreneurship’: this term by definition incorporates the ability to take risks, the capacity to invest, etc. Of the reported 633.88 lakh MSMEs, 99.5 % are micro enterprises, of which less than 20 % are owned by women. Today, a shocking 92 % of these women-owned ‘enterprises’ are necessity-driven, with loans from SHGs financing merely one per cent of women-led enterprises. No wonder then that India ranks 57 of 65 countries in Entrepreneurship, and 63 of 65 in Entrepreneurial Activity.

In the last five years, beginning with the year of demonetisation up to the latest PLFS data for 2023-24, Regular work has fallen from about 24 % to 21 %; Casual work from 24 % to a historic low of about 19 %: the only sector that is rising is that of Self-employment from 52 % to more than 58 %. I thus assert that the prevailing paradigm of growth has been converted from a jobless pattern to a job-loss pattern.

The situation, in fact, is even more problematic if we analytically incorporate women’s participation in economic activity at all three essential levels of Paid, Under-Paid and Unpaid work, especially in their major source of livelihoods – Self-employment. As of today, over 57 % of rural Self-employed women are Unpaid Family Workers, with urban women not too far behind at one-third. The implication is obvious: the invisibilisation of women’s contribution to the economy and hence their devaluation in policies.

And this, of course, not taking into account the huge burden of unrecognised unpaid work women perform, which has, in fact, actually risen in recent times as a result of gender-exclusionary macro policies. Globally, India has among the highest and most unequal gender division of unpaid work, with women spending on average about four hours per day on unpaid domestic work, and men about one hour and forty minutes. I would like to stress here that the resolution of this high and unequal time poverty burden lies not at the micro level but primarily at the macro policy level, which needs to be gender-sensitive and focused on reducing the total burden.

For those who are fortunate enough to find employment, the conditions and quality of work are not only abysmal but actually declining at several levels. A few illustrations, all based on PLFS data of the last five years, are listed below:

• Fall in Real Wages by 5 % for Regular Workers, with the average wage negative at –2.9 %.
• 2 % decline in Real Earnings of those who are Self-employed.
• High sectoral differentials: Male Own Account Workers earn half of Male Regular Workers; women earn below 30 %.
• Gender Ratio of rural and urban Self-employed women’s earnings fell by 9 percentage points, reaching an all-time high gender gap of 47 %.
• Predictably, the poorest one-fifth report the sharpest decline in wages and earnings.
• Regular Workers with no social security benefits have risen from 50 % to 54 %.
• 60 % of male and 56 % of female Regular Workers do not have a job contract, and 48 % of men and 44 % of women do not get Paid Leave.

Wage differentials have always existed not only across gender but also across caste. For example, SC and ST report the lowest at 0.81 and 0.65 in terms of Regular/Salaried jobs with a written contract, with the Net Income Gap between them and Other businesses reaching a high of 55 % due to discrimination. The fastest-increasing form of labour discrimination is that between non-Muslims and Muslims, which is calculated as being 70 % in urban India. In the past five years Muslim Labour-force Participation Rate fell by 3 percentage points, rural males being the worst affected by a 9 percentage point decline.
A few indicators are:

• 23.3 % Non-Muslims and 15.6 % Muslims are employed as Regular workers in urban areas.
• Non-Muslim Regular workers earn a low of Rs. 20,346 per month, and their Muslim counterparts earn much less at Rs. 13,672.
• Self-employment earnings for Non-Muslims are recorded at Rs. 15,878 per month, Muslims at Rs. 11,421.

Among the G20 nations, India has the lowest Female Labour-force Participation Rate, the highest Work Gender Gap at 57 %, and the sharpest increase in the Gender Wage Gap, which today exceeds 40 %. Consequently, our country ranks 140 of 156 nations in the Global Gender Gap, with Women’s Economic Participation and Health ranking at an all-time low of 142 of 146.

INSTITUTIONALISATION OF INEQUALITIES:

Understanding the process of de-equalisation requires an understanding of several policies and laws that are, in fact, institutionalising existing inequalities and also creating new ones. A detailed analysis would require several more articles; therefore is provided a summary of some of the major policies and ‘reforms’, often initiated without debate and discussion, several of them under what I term as the ‘camouflage of COVID’, when the majority of India’s citizens were undergoing tremendous hardships.

Introduced as Ordinances in June 2020 with no debate or discussion within the Parliament nor with farmers’ organisations, the Farm Acts were enacted barely three months later: Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; Farmers’ (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance; Farm Services Act, 2020, along with the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020. These Acts met with unprecedented resistance, with farmers waging the largest and longest struggle in the history of the world, compelling the withdrawal of these laws. Women formed a huge part of these protests: after all, 80 % of rural women work in the agriculture sector.

Dilution of Forest Rights Act (FRA), Forest Conservation Act (FCA), and Environment Impact Assessment policy (EIA): Yet another crucial area of resilience that women have historically relied on and which is being increasingly encroached upon is their rights over Common Property Resources, the produce of which ensures un-priced nutrition for their families as well as income earned by sale of commodities. The Environment Impact Assessment policy issued in 2020 significantly waters down the 2006 rules, making it easier to implement projects without any environmental scrutiny whatsoever. The dilution of the Forest Rights Act (2006), coupled with the latest dilution of powers of the State in forest matters under the Forest Conservation Act (1980), as well as recent mining reforms, including privatisation of coal, violates and undermines the provisions of the 1996 Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act. The result is the denial of the historical and constitutional rights guaranteed to protect tribal communities and natural resources. In this context, it is crucial to point out that when the growth trajectory needs to urgently prioritise gender-sensitive, sustainable and sustained livelihood opportunities, India, with the lowest ever overall score of 18.9, now ranks at the bottom of the global Environment Performance Index calculated for 180 countries.

The four Labour Codes have replaced every single law that workers in India have struggled for for years. Instead of strengthening labour rights, these ‘reforms’, “seek to improve the business environment in the country largely by reducing the labour compliance burden of industries”. Daily working hours are increased from the internationally accepted 8 hours to 10 to 12 and in ‘emergency’ situations cases even to 12 hours, thus making redundant more than an entire shift of workers, and this in a situation where the unemployment rate is the highest in 45 years. The negation of labour rights include restrictions of definition of employee/worker to establishment/industry; de-recognition of home based workers, domestic workers, gig & platform workers, scheme-based, ASHA, Anganwadi, MGNREGA, care givers, auxiliary nurses, apprentices, etc by precluding work in private households; delinking of sexual harassment from safe conditions of work; reinforcement and creation of new gender stereotypes; invisibilisation of female- and child headed households; self-certification of compliance by employer; reduction of women’s representation on Boards and Committees; extension of ban on strikes and other forms of democratic protest.

VIII: IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION:

Without romanticising the past, it needs to be recognised that India today is in a state of rather severe regression of democratic rights, especially that of women, the process moving from equality to inequality: this is evident as the data and analysis above prove. This is located and contextualised in a scenario where all economic, extra-economic and non-economic indicators and global rankings of the nation are falling dramatically. India ranks at 122 of 166 countries for SDG attainment. While the size of the economy is touted as being the fifth largest in 2024, it must be remembered that it was in third place in 2014. In terms of Per Capita Income, India stands at 143 of 181. The levels of inequality are unprecedented at 129 of 157 nations, with 1 % owning 41 % of wealth and 50 % merely 3 %; in fact, if the top few billionaires are removed from calculations, India stands below Sub-Saharan Africa.

Our country today is characterised by several inter-linked factors and forces: the dominant processes are intensification of patriarchal rigidities, deepening of economic and extra-economic divides, and increased exclusion of the vulnerable and marginalised. The consequence is gendered de-equalisation in multiple and myriad ways. Women are central at all levels and across all layers, given their roles in the inter-linked systems of production, distribution, consumption, maintenance, reproduction of goods & services, community management, and reproduction of the labour force. In performing their contribution to income-earning, income-augmenting and income-saving activities, they face increasingly numerous patriarchal economic and extra-economic constraints that reduce and also devisibilise their contribution to the national economy.

What I term as the Macro-Patriarchal State is today functioning with an even stronger interlocking of macro policies with patriarchal structures: the connection between the two is organic, and one cannot exist without the other in the current stage and pattern of growth: in other words, a dialectical dependency, each feeding into the other and thereby continuously getting reinforced. Additionally, the democratic backsliding of India, now internationally referred to as a ‘flawed democracy’, is increasingly challenging the rights guaranteed to us, thereby necessitating a re-reading of and re-learning from the Constitution of India. There are two Articles I would like to specifically mention: one, Article 15 which guarantees no discrimination on the basis of religion, race, caste, sex or place, and that nothing shall prevent the State from making special provisions for women and children: two, Article 39 which guarantees every citizen the right to an adequate means of livelihood, assures equal pay for equal work, ensures that the distribution of community resources must be to subserve the common good, and asserts that the economic system should not result in concentration of wealth. In the ultimate sense, India appears to be moving away from its own Constitution in terms of rights as well as vision.