Challenges Faced by Women in India’s Unorganised Sector

Step into any village field at dawn or a city construction site at midday, and one fact becomes impossible to miss: India’s unorganised economy runs on the labour of women. From sowing paddy and rolling beedis to carrying bricks and cleaning urban homes, millions of women hold up the country’s informal workforce while remaining largely invisible in official statistics, labour laws, and social security schemes. Understanding why this happens, and what it costs the women involved, is central to any honest conversation about gender and the economy.

Why the unorganised sector matters for women 🔗

The unorganised or informal sector refers to enterprises that are not formally registered, employ fewer than ten workers, and fall outside the protection of most labour legislation. It is, by far, the largest employer of Indian women. According to research published by BMC Health Services Research, roughly 93% of India’s total workforce is informal, with over 95% of working women engaged in such work. This concentration reflects pronounced gender-based vulnerabilities rather than free choice.

The reasons women cluster here are structural. Limited schooling, restrictions on mobility, the burden of unpaid domestic care, and the need for flexible hours all push women toward jobs that are nearby, easy to enter, and easy to exit. These are precisely the qualities that informal work offers, along with low wages, no contracts, and no safety net.

The scale of women’s informal employment 🔗

The numbers tell a stark story. As per data analysed in a study on structural changes in women’s labour, about 73% of rural working women are still engaged in agriculture and allied activities. Construction has emerged as the largest non-farm employer for rural women, while urban women dominate domestic and household work. The E-Shram portal, the government’s database of unorganised workers, confirms this gendered pattern: women hold roughly 96% of registrations in the domestic and household work category, a share that dwarfs almost every other sector.

Women’s dominance in agriculture and informal work 🔗

Agriculture remains the single biggest employer of Indian women in absolute terms. Women perform the most labour-intensive tasks in farming: weeding, transplanting, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, and post-harvest processing. Yet most are classified as unpaid family workers or casual labourers, not as cultivators, because the land is rarely in their name. This invisibility has serious consequences. Without land titles, women cannot access institutional credit, crop insurance, or many government schemes designed for “farmers.”

Beyond agriculture, women dominate specific corners of the informal economy: beedi rolling, agarbatti making, papad and pickle preparation, garment piecework, fish processing, domestic service, and waste picking. These occupations share a pattern. They are home-based or invisible, low-paid, dependent on middlemen, and almost entirely outside the reach of factory inspectors or labour officials.

The problem of “disguised” work 🔗

A large share of women’s economic contribution is simply not counted. As UN Women notes, in South Asia over 80% of women in non-agricultural jobs are in informal employment, often without any protection of labour laws, social benefits, pension, health insurance, or paid sick leave. When women’s work is treated as an extension of household duties, it is paid less, valued less, and recorded less.

Health and safety concerns 🔗

The most underreported cost of informal work is what it does to women’s bodies. Research published in the Indian Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine documents that female agricultural workers suffer disproportionately from generalised body aches, respiratory allergies, pesticide-related toxicity, injuries from sharp tools, and chronic exposure to the sun. They squat for hours during transplanting, lift heavy loads of fodder and water, and inhale dust during threshing, all without protective equipment.

Specific risks in agriculture 🔗

Pesticide exposure is one of the most serious occupational hazards. Women mix and apply chemicals without gloves, masks, or training, and they often wash contaminated clothing along with the family’s laundry. The same studies record higher rates of tuberculosis, hypertension, anaemia, joint pain, and reproductive health issues among female agricultural workers compared to the general female population. Reproductive complications are aggravated by long hours of standing, lifting, and squatting through pregnancy, since taking time off means losing the day’s wage.

Risks on construction sites 🔗

Construction is the second-largest non-farm employer of informal women, and the conditions are punishing. A study on health and safety of women in construction and beedi rolling describes high rates of respiratory illness, dermatological problems, musculoskeletal disorders, heat stroke, dehydration, and psychological stress. Women on building sites are typically assigned the task of head-loading: carrying pans of wet cement, sand, and bricks up scaffolding all day. They rarely receive helmets, gloves, or safety harnesses. Sanitation facilities are almost non-existent, which forces women to restrict water intake and contributes to urinary tract infections.

Health risks in home-based work 🔗

Beedi rolling, often done at home, exposes women and their children to tobacco dust for ten to twelve hours a day, leading to chronic respiratory disease, tuberculosis, and skin problems. Home-based garment workers develop severe back and eye strain. Waste pickers handle medical and chemical refuse without gloves. Across all these settings, occupational health surveillance is essentially absent because there is no factory, no employer of record, and no inspector.

Employment insecurity, low pay, and long hours 🔗

The defining feature of unorganised work is precariousness. Wages are paid daily or weekly, are below the legal minimum in most cases, and can be withheld at the contractor’s discretion. There are no written contracts, no provident fund, no maternity benefit, and no severance pay. When work dries up, so does income.

The persistent wage gap 🔗

Women in the unorganised sector are paid significantly less than men for the same tasks. A study by the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) found that the average wage of women workers was Rs. 1815 against Rs. 3842 for men. In agriculture, the convention is that women’s labour is “lighter” or “supportive,” even when they work the same hours, which is then used to justify lower piece rates. The Periodic Labour Force Survey 2023-24 showed female labour force participation rising to 41.7%, but most of this rise has come in low-productivity, informal, and unpaid family work rather than salaried jobs.

The double shift 🔗

A woman’s working day in the unorganised sector rarely ends when she clocks out. She returns home to cooking, cleaning, fetching water, collecting fuel, and caring for children and elders, work that is unpaid and uncounted. This double burden eats into rest, sleep, and nutrition. It also explains why women cannot easily switch to better-paying jobs that demand longer commutes or fixed hours.

Absence of social protection 🔗

The Factories Act, the Employees’ State Insurance Act, and the Maternity Benefit Act offer real protections, but they apply almost exclusively to the organised sector. The Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008, and the more recent Code on Social Security, 2020, were meant to fill this gap, but implementation has been patchy. As recent research on barriers to women’s empowerment in the informal sector concludes, women face significant income insecurity, lack of legal protection, and limited access to social benefits, which together deepen gender inequality.

Migration and seasonal work 🔗

For millions of women, surviving in the informal economy means moving. Agrarian distress, drought, indebtedness, and shrinking village livelihoods push entire families into seasonal migration to brick kilns, sugarcane fields, construction sites, and stone quarries. The research on migrant workers’ informal arrangements documents how migrant women are often hired as jodis, or couple-units, not as independent workers, but as 1.5 labour units recruited along with their husbands. The pay goes to the man, leaving women with little control over their own earnings.

What seasonal migration looks like 🔗

A typical pattern: a family from drought-prone Bundelkhand or western Odisha migrates after the monsoon to a brick kiln in Telangana or a sugarcane field in Maharashtra. They live in tarpaulin sheds at the worksite for six to eight months. Women work alongside men, often pregnant or with infants tied to their backs, lifting and stacking bricks or cutting cane. Wages are paid as an advance at the start of the season and “adjusted” against output at the end, a system that frequently leaves families in debt.

Specific vulnerabilities of migrant women 🔗

Migrant women face overlapping risks. They lose access to ration cards, anganwadi services, school enrolment for children, and public health facilities, all of which are tied to a permanent address. They are more vulnerable to wage theft, sexual harassment by contractors, and trafficking. The COVID-19 lockdown of 2020 exposed how thin the safety net is, with women migrants walking hundreds of kilometres home, often pregnant or with small children, with no transport, no food, and no wages.

Gendered consequences of migration 🔗

Migration also reshapes the rural household. When men migrate alone, women left behind take over farming and household decisions, a phenomenon sometimes called the feminisation of agriculture. They become de facto farmers but without the legal recognition or resources of one. When women migrate themselves, they lose community networks, kin support, and continuity of healthcare during pregnancy. Either way, the economic vulnerability of the family translates most heavily into women’s bodies and time.

The path forward 🔗

Recognising women workers in the unorganised sector starts with counting them properly. The E-Shram portal is a beginning, but registration alone does not deliver wages, safety equipment, or maternity care. Effective change requires implementing minimum wages, extending occupational health services to farm and construction workers, expanding crèche facilities at worksites, granting land rights to women cultivators, and treating domestic work as work. Organisations like SEWA have shown that when informal women workers organise into cooperatives and unions, they can negotiate better terms, access credit, and demand accountability from the state.

What do you think? If a domestic worker, a beedi roller, and a construction headloader contribute as much to household survival as any salaried employee, what would it take for Indian labour policy to finally treat them as workers with rights, not as invisible helpers? And how much of the responsibility for change lies with the state, with employers, and with us as households that hire informal labour every day?

References

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12913-025-13855-7
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7539753/
3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1407054/india-share-of-workers-in-informal-sector-by-gender/
4. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/women-in-informal-economy
5. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7877425/
6. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-8421-9_6
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_India
8. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/female-labour-force-participation-in-india
9. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43621-025-01398-0
10. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7680072/