According to the Inter Parliamentary Union 2021 report on Women in Politics, women occupy only 25.5% seats in national parliaments or the highest governing bodies at the national level. Their dismal numerical representation in the political sphere not only cripples the goal of achieving gender equality but also undermines women’s substantive representation. Read more

Any evaluation of major policy documents such as the annual budget must keep the context in mind. This is particularly true at this juncture because these have been extraordinary times with the global pandemic having battered practically every national economy. The Indian economy has suffered more than most others with GDP plummeting by 7.7 percent during the last financial year. What is worse is that it is the bottom third of the population that has suffered the most. Read more

India entered a three-week lockdown to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic in the month of March 2020. The first lockdown was announced on 24 March and remained in effect from 25 March 2020 to 14 April 2020. Ever since, attempts have been made to try and understand how India has fared with the coronavirus pandemic and how the country of more than 1.3 billion people has handled it. Read more

Recorded labour force participation of Indian women, never very high, logged a dramatic decline between 2004-5 and 2011-12 and has continued to decline thereafter, albeit at a lower rate. The bulk of the decline has been in the labour force participation rate (LFPR) of rural women; urban women, whose LFPR was always lower than that for rural women, did not register a decline. Read more

In 2017, only 24% of urban Indian women above the age of 15 were working or looking for work compared to 82% men. We use data from an online job portal in India to examine the role of gender targeting in job ads in shaping disparities between men and women in the Indian labor market. Read more