Historical Context of Women’s Economic Participation in India

When the Committee on the Status of Women in India submitted its landmark report Towards Equality in 1974, the findings stunned policymakers. Nearly three decades after independence, women’s participation in the formal economy was not rising – it was falling. To understand why women’s economic contribution in India has been historically undervalued, undercounted, and politically contested, we have to trace a journey that begins with Jawaharlal Nehru’s nation-building vision and runs through committee rooms, census definitions, and feminist economics. The story of women in the Indian economy is, in many ways, the story of what a society chooses to count as “work.”

Nehru’s vision: women as the measure of a nation 🔗

Jawaharlal Nehru’s view of women’s role in independent India was not symbolic – it was structural. He believed the social transformation of the country could not happen without women stepping into public, economic, and political life. In a 1956 letter to Chief Ministers reflecting on the Hindu Law Reform Bills, Nehru observed that a nation’s progress is intimately connected with the status of its women. His more frequently quoted formulation – that to awaken the people, women must first be awakened, because once she moves, the family, the village, and the nation move – captured the same idea in everyday language.

This was not merely a moral statement. Nehru was framing women’s status as a development indicator – a way of evaluating whether a newly independent nation was actually progressing or simply reproducing old hierarchies under a new flag. The Constitution, drafted in this spirit, pledged equality before law, equal opportunity in public employment, and the directive of equal pay for equal work. On paper, the foundations were impressive.

From promise to paradox 🔗

The problem was that constitutional guarantees did not automatically translate into lived experience. Women remained concentrated in unpaid household labour, subsistence agriculture, and informal work that the State barely recognised as “economic activity.” Through the 1950s and 1960s, education expanded, urban professional spaces slowly opened up, and a thin layer of women entered universities, civil services, and politics. But for the vast majority – rural, poor, low-caste – the promise of equality felt distant.

By the late 1960s, scholars and activists were beginning to ask an uncomfortable question: if Nehru’s yardstick was correct, what did the actual numbers say about the nation’s progress? The answer would arrive in 1974, and it would be deeply unsettling.

The Committee on the Status of Women in India, 1971 🔗

In response to a United Nations call for member states to assess the position of women in their societies, the Government of India set up the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI) on 22 September 1971. The committee was chaired by Phulrenu Guha, a Union Minister and social worker, and brought together scholars, activists, and administrators including Leela Dube, Lotika Sarkar, Maniben Kara, and Vina Mazumdar as Member Secretary.

The committee’s mandate was unusually wide. It was tasked with examining the constitutional, legal, and administrative provisions affecting women’s social status, particularly in rural India, and with reviewing the progress of women’s education and the problems of working women, including discrimination in employment and wages. To do this seriously, the committee did not rely only on Delhi-based data. It travelled across states and union territories, surveying roughly 500 women in each state and collecting testimony directly from villages, factories, and homes.

Towards Equality: a quiet earthquake 🔗

The committee submitted its report, Towards Equality, on 31 December 1974. What it documented was not gradual progress but visible deterioration. The findings included a falling child sex ratio, stagnant female literacy, rising poverty among women in the transition from agrarian to industrial society, and a steady decline in women’s recorded participation in the workforce. As one account of Vina Mazumdar’s role notes, the report highlighted the rise in poverty amongst women during this economic transition and the decline of the sex ratio in India.

The political effect was significant. Towards Equality is widely credited with laying the foundation of the women’s movement in independent India and reopening the “women’s question” for government, academia, and civil society. It also created the intellectual space in which Women’s Studies as a discipline would emerge in India, eventually leading to the Centre for Women’s Development Studies in 1980.

Why the report mattered for the economy 🔗

For the first time, an official document was saying clearly that economic modernisation in India was not gender-neutral. Industrialisation, mechanisation of agriculture, and the shift away from household-based production were displacing women from traditional livelihoods faster than new opportunities were absorbing them. Female work participation, as measured by the Census, had been declining steadily – and the committee argued this could not be dismissed as a statistical quirk. It reflected real economic exclusion.

This finding directly challenged the comfortable assumption that growth would automatically improve women’s lives. It forced policymakers to confront a question that economists like Bina Agarwal and Devaki Jain would later sharpen: was the problem that women were dropping out of work, or that the measurement system was failing to see the work they were doing?

The census and the definition of “work” 🔗

To understand why female work participation appeared to be declining, it helps to look at how the Indian Census actually defined work. For decades, the census privileged paid, formal, market-based employment. A woman who spent ten hours a day fetching water, collecting fuelwood, tending livestock, working on the family farm, processing food grains, and caring for children was often categorised as a “non-worker” or “housewife.” Her labour produced real economic value – but because it was not exchanged for wages, it did not appear in the data.

The problem of subsistence and unpaid work 🔗

This definitional issue is not minor. The Indian economy historically rested on household-based production where the boundary between “domestic” and “economic” was blurred. Women dehusking paddy, weaving, dairying, kitchen gardening, or assisting in family enterprises were producing goods and services that the household consumed or sold. Yet under enumerator instructions, much of this was filed away as housework. The result, as one analysis bluntly puts it, is that women’s work in India has been “largely informal, invisible, and labour-intensive”, with scant attention paid to it in systematic labour market studies until recent times.

The CSWI was among the first official bodies to flag this. It pointed out that the apparent decline in female workforce participation between successive censuses was partly real (women were genuinely being pushed out of certain occupations) and partly an artefact of changing definitions and enumerator biases that systematically undercounted women.

Critiques from gender economists 🔗

Feminist and gender economists have built extensively on this critique. They argue that mainstream economic accounting suffers from three interrelated blind spots when it comes to women. First, it ignores unpaid care work – cooking, cleaning, childcare, eldercare – even though this work directly subsidises the formal economy by reproducing the labour force. The Economic Survey 2024 estimated that women’s unpaid care work contributes around 3.1% of GDP, and even this is widely considered an underestimate.

Second, it undervalues subsistence and home-based production, which does not pass through markets but is essential to household survival. Third, enumerator bias and household reporting norms mean that women themselves often describe their work as “just helping at home,” even when they spend long hours on productive tasks. The respondent, the enumerator, and the questionnaire all collude, unintentionally, to make women’s labour disappear.

How the data tells two stories 🔗

The legacy of these measurement problems is visible even today. Estimates of the female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) in India have swung dramatically depending on definitions and survey methods. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, the FLFPR for women aged 15 and above declined from 31.2% in 2011-12 to 23.3% in 2017-18, before rising sharply to 41.7% in 2023-24. But analysts caution that this rise is driven largely by women being counted as helpers in household enterprises or as self-employed workers, not by growth in paid or formal employment. In other words, the data is finally seeing some of what was always there – but quality of work remains a separate concern.

International comparisons make the gap starker. India’s FLFPR stood at around 32% in 2024, significantly lower than peer economies such as Vietnam, Thailand and China, with men’s participation rate roughly double that of women. Around 78% of women in the Indian labour force are in vulnerable employment without formal contracts, adequate social security, or trade union representation.

Why this history still matters 🔗

The threads tied together by Nehru’s vision, the CSWI’s findings, and the long debate over definitions are not just historical curiosities. They shape the policy questions India is still wrestling with. When the government discusses skilling missions, MGNREGA wages, maternity benefits, childcare infrastructure, or women’s safety in public transport, it is implicitly answering the questions Towards Equality first put on the table: What counts as work? Whose labour is recognised? Who benefits from growth?

The historical context also reminds us that women’s economic exclusion in India was not a passive oversight. It was produced by specific decisions – about what to measure, what to value, and which kinds of labour to make visible in national accounts. Recognising this history is the first step toward designing policies that treat women not as a residual category in labour data, but as central economic actors whose contributions have always been there, even when the numbers refused to see them.

What do you think? If a significant share of women’s productive labour has historically been invisible in official statistics, how should India redesign its surveys and economic accounts to capture it accurately – and would simply counting unpaid work better be enough, or does real change require revaluing it economically and socially?

References

1. https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/opinion/nehru-the-pioneer-for-mid-day-meals-and-greater-representation-of-women-in-legislatures
2. https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/library/resource/towards-equality-report-of-the-committee-on-the-status-of-women-in-india/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vina_Mazumdar
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_Equality
5. https://www.epw.in/engage/article/insights-female-labour-force-participation-india
6. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/female-labour-force-participation-in-india
7. https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/datanomics-women-s-participation-rate-in-india-s-workforce-remains-low-126030500638_1.html