Measuring Female Work Participation in Rural India: What Do the Primary and Secondary Data Show?

A serious problem related to structural changes in the Indian economy has been the low and declining worker-population ratio (WPR) of women in rural India over the last two to three decades. Fluctuations in the estimated number of workers across different categories of workers suggest the probability of classification errors in the National Sample Survey Organisation’s (NSSO) Employment and Unemployment Surveys (EUS). From the point of view of the conceptual validity of economic activity and to prevent possible measurement errors, it is preferable to calculate augmented WPR by including the specified activities category (i), i.e., production of primary goods for home consumption, including animal husbandry. The trend in female WPR after 2011–12 is unknown as the NSSO stopped disseminating EUS data. After examining comparability with the Labour Bureau’s EUS data, we use the latter to extend female WPR up to 2015–16. This exercise shows that the decline of female WPR after 2004–05 decelerated but continued till 2015–16. Village surveys conducted by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS) in West Bengal in 2010 and 2015 show that female employment opportunities outside the village were limited, and that most employment was in agriculture. Further, female WPRs in West Bengal are low. Animal husbandry is an important aspect of the work of women in the village. A majority of female workers engaged in animal husbandry belong to poor, marginal, and landless households in the village. We argue that WPR defined as usual principal and subsidiary status (UPSS), plus specified activity participation rate, may be more appropriate for measuring women’s participation in economic activities in rural areas, than WPR (UPSS) alone.