India’s Invisible Half: Unpacking the Paradox of Indian Women’s Labour

Overview

India’s female labour force participation has followed a paradoxical, non-linear path rather than a steady climb. The female Worker Population Ratio (WPR) peaked at 29.7% in 1977-78, then declined steadily through subsequent decades, with sharp drops in 1999-2000 and 2009-10, bottoming out at a historic low of 16.5% in 2017-18 — coinciding with record national unemployment. This decline continued into the pandemic, with the World Bank’s modelled estimate falling to 16.1% in 2020.

Since then, participation has surged: by 2023-24 the female WPR reached 40.3% and the LFPR 41.7%, more than doubling from 2017-18 levels. However, the paper argues this jump does not reflect genuine growth in paid employment for women. Instead, it attributes the rise to three factors: better statistical capture of previously undercounted informal and subsidiary work; India’s growth model skipping labour-intensive manufacturing (which absorbs female labour elsewhere) in favor of high-skill services, leaving less-educated women without non-farm alternatives; and distress-driven self-employment in agriculture, where women — now 55% of the agricultural workforce — have taken up unpaid family farm work as men migrate to non-farm jobs.

The paper’s core conclusion is that this recovery represents increased visibility of women’s work rather than structural empowerment. The headline numbers mask an informal economy absorbing vulnerable female labour rather than a shift toward stable, salaried, and dignified employment — most working women remain uncontracted, low-waged, home-based or agricultural, and lack social security, skilling opportunities, or legal protections.