The recent period has been one of very significant changes both in the Indian economy as a whole and in the economic condition of women workers in India. With respect to women`s work, there have been four apparently contradictory trends: simultaneous increases in the incidence of paid labour, underpaid labour and unpaid labour, and the open unemployment of women. This is a paradox because it is generally expected that when employment increases, unemployment will come down; or when paid labour increases, unpaid labour will decrease.

This reflects a basic feature of recent Indian economic growth, which is the fact of exclusion: exclusion from control over assets; exclusion from the benefits of economic growth; exclusion from the impact of physical and social infrastructure expansion; exclusion from education and from income-generating opportunities. This exclusion has been along class or income lines, by geographical location, by caste and community, and by gender. However, exclusion from benefits has not meant exclusion from the system as such—rather, those who are supposedly marginalised or excluded have been affected precisely because they have been incorporated into market systems. So there has been in India a process of exclusion through incorporation, a process that has actually been typical of capitalist accumulation across the world, especially in its more dynamic phases.

One crucial reason for this is that the aggregate output growth has not been accompanied by similar increases in employment. In particular, formal employment has stagnated, and even paid employment in general, (in the form of regular of casual work), has fallen as a share of total employment. Most of the recent increases in employment have been in the form of self-employment. This growing army of `self-employed` workers, who now account for more than half the work force, have been excluded from paid employment because of the sheer difficulty of finding jobs but are nevertheless heavily involved in commercial activity and exposed to market uncertainties in the search for livelihood. Therefore, the Indian economy shows a paradoxical trajectory of high aggregate growth with inadequate or poor employment generation. And this has directly impacted the lives of women in India.

It is true that, compared to many other countries, there has been relative stability of aggregate female work participation rates in India over time, despite some increase in urban female work participation, reflected in the most recent data. But there have been wide variations across states, differing trends across rural and urban areas, and changes in the pattern of work. For urban women, the increase in regular work has dominantly been in relatively low-paid service activities, along with some manufacturing. In manufacturing, there has been some recent growth of petty home-based activities of women, typically with very low remuneration, performing outsourced work as part of a larger production chain. But explicitly export-oriented employment, even in special zones set up for the purpose, still accounts for only a tiny fraction of women`s paid work in urban India. Meanwhile, in rural India, self-employment has come to dominate women`s activities even in non-agricultural occupations, largely because of the evident difficulty of finding paid work.

A significant and disturbing trend is the evidence on wages: the average real wages of women workers increased relatively little over the ten-year period 1993–94 to 2004–05 (the most recent period for which reliable data are available) despite rapid increases in national income over this period; for some categories of women workers (rural graduates and urban illiterate females), their real wages actually declined. What is more, there were fairly sharp increases in gender gaps in wages across all categories of workers. Some of the gender gaps in wages for certain categories of workers such as production and transport workers are now among the highest in the world.

Unfortunately, recent public employment has not bucked the overall trend of low average real wages, and casual or non-permanent contracts for women workers. Whereas a privileged minority of women in government employment continue to access the benefits of the government behaving as a `model employer`, new employment for the purpose of providing essential public services has been concentrated in low-remuneration activities with uncertain contracts and hardly any benefits. This is true of school education (with the employment of para-teachers) as well as health and nutrition (with reliance on anganwadi workers and ASHAs). Indeed, the recent provision of basic public services in India has increasingly relied upon the underpaid labour of women workers.

Conditions of self-employment among women show many of the disturbing tendencies of wage employment. The most important form of female self-employment is cultivation. But the enormous contribution of women to agricultural production, as farmers, unpaid workers on family farms and agricultural labour, is largely unrecognised. And their work is more precarious than that of men because they are typically denied land rights and all the associated benefits, such as access to credit, extension services and subsidised inputs. Cultivation has become volatile and insecure and women farmers have been especially adversely affected. Meanwhile, women`s self-employment in non-agriculture is largely characterised by both low expectations regarding income and remuneration, and substantial non-fulfilment of even these low expectations. Despite some increase in remuneration, self-employment among professionals and micro-entrepreneurs, in general, the expansion of self-employment seems to be a distress-driven process, determined by the lack of availability of sufficient paid work on acceptable terms.

These conditions would suggest that distress migration among women is also on the increase, and this appears to be the case. There is evidence of a substantial increase in economic migration by women, both within and across borders. This reflects both `push` and `pull` factors, so not all of it has been distress-driven. Migration is a complex process, which can be a source of either empowerment or exploitation of women, depending on the context and the factors that have influenced the decision to migrate. Women migrants have been significant in cross-border labour movements, especially within Asia, and their remittances have played an important role in shoring up the aggregate balance of payments of the country in the past two decades. They work dominantly in service activities and the care economy, which means that the demand for their work is less dependent upon the business cycle in host economies than is the demand for male migrants in production work. But in distress-driven cases, there is often a fine line between voluntary migration and trafficking of women and girl children. Whereas the official data sources are relatively poor at picking up internal migration, especially when it is short-term in nature, there is micro evidence suggesting a substantial increase in such migration in the past decade, largely driven by agrarian crisis and the paucity of adequate income-generating activities across much of India. A major problem is the inappropriateness of public policy with respect to migration, and particularly female migration for work. Not only is there hardly anything by way of assistance or protection for migrants but also all public service delivery and citizenship rights in India are residence-based, meaning that short-term migrants are denied both access and rights.

A consideration of the extent of unpaid work by women indicates that a very substantial amount of women`s time is devoted to unpaid labour, often at the cost of leisure and rest. Such unpaid labour may actually have been increasing over time, especially in the past decade. Public policies have played a role in causing the unpaid labour time of women to rise, either because of reduced social expenditure that places a larger burden of care on women, or privatised or degraded common property resources or inadequate infrastructure facilities that increase the time spent on provisioning essential goods for the household, or simply because even well-meaning policies are often gender-blind.

This explains the new pattern of women`s employment especially in urban India. It is often trumpeted that regular employment of women in urban India has increased in the period of liberalisation. But a look at the nature of such work provides little comfort. After work in the export-oriented garments industries, the biggest single increase in employment—and the category of work that is now the single largest for urban Indian women—has been among those employed in private households. In other words, women working as domestic servants numbered more than three million in 2004–05, and accounted for more than 12 per cent of all women workers in urban India.

Domestic service is well known to be poorly paid and often under harsh conditions, and is definitely not a `preferred` occupation signifying greater economic empowerment of women. Certainly, it cannot be seen as a positive sign of a vibrant dynamic economy undergoing positive structural transformation.