There is an urgent need for a comprehensive survey of poor rural women and how they spend their time
There is an urgent need for a comprehensive survey of poor rural women and how they spend their time
The Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) reported that the labor participation rate for rural women was 9.92% in March 2022, while it was 67.24% for men. This is cause for concern. According to CMIE, millions of people leaving the labor market have “probably” stopped looking for employment. [because they were] Very disappointed by their failure to find a job and under the belief that no jobs were available”. In countries such as the US, Canada and Australia, workers who are willing to work but give up looking for work for various reasons are called ‘discouraged workers’ and are included in the unemployed category. This phenomenon, not captured by any official labor force survey in India, incorrectly described women as “quitting” or “leaving the labor market”, giving the impression that it was a choice made by them. Whereas, in reality, women are pushed out. of employment. CMIE provides valuable inputs for urgently needed government intervention in rural India.
The ground level reality is worse than CMIE’s suggestion and the government’s refusal. Women who belong to landless households or women with low holdings cannot afford the luxury of being “discouraged”. These are “compulsory” workers.
depth of crisis
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) sites are perhaps the best place to understand the working conditions of millions of women. A special project in Kalaburagi district focuses on building more than 200 percolation ponds, which are designed to address depleting groundwater levels and help recharge wells. The project provides a few workdays to an estimated 300 workers from four villages. The soil is hard and dry and the project extends for several kilometres. Women, who outnumber men, work only in pairs of women. They dig and lift the soil. In hot summer they have to dig a 10X10X1 tank in a day. An assistant to the officer-in-charge estimated that since the soil was hard and rocky, this would mean digging and lifting about 3,000 kg of soil daily. Since most of these women are unable to complete the task, they do not get a piece rate of ₹309; They get only ₹280 to ₹285. There was no crche at the site. There was no water, so the women used to walk a kilometer to the water source to fill their two liter bottles. He said that he has pain in his limbs. Many people said they felt dizzy.
But despite the difficult situation, every employee on the site complained about getting work only for about 40 days in a year. They wanted more because they considered MGNREGA work as their savior. The fact that they want to do more of this punitive work reveals the depth of the distress the poor rural households are facing.
During the agricultural season, all the women worked on others’ land, earning almost the same amount on the MGNREGA site. But the mechanization of agricultural operations has reduced the working days to less than three months in a year. That’s why many women become part-time construction workers. They are hired by a network of “masons” working for contractors. They go to construction sites with their families or other women of the village for a few months. Not one of them I could find, who was registered as a construction worker. Hence they were ineligible for any legal benefit to be received from the Construction Workers Welfare Board. At a construction site, each of them carried at least 1,000 bricks a day, each weighing two kilos, or other heavy building material, often carried with this load to the first or second floors. They were being paid ₹300 per day as compared to men.
When manual or construction work is not available, women find other jobs. Some of them make baskets of twigs and brooms. They walk from village to village, often 25 km a day, to sell baskets. It takes two days to make 10 baskets for which they make ₹10 per basket. Some women provide services such as cleaning for landholder families or do odd jobs for an average of three or four days a month. Some do sewing work. They also do their household chores themselves. So, as per the anecdotal evidence of women on MGNREGA site, during a year an individual woman is an MGNREGA worker, an agricultural worker, a construction worker, a migrant worker, a self-employed street vendor, a tailor. A strange job domestic worker, and a housewife doing many household chores.
The work of the ‘compulsory’ woman worker is never-ending. Siddama, a 45-year-old mother of four from Yadagiri district, spread her arms and said: “My arms do that labor… It’s me, I have assets to earn money for my family to survive. When I I work, so they eat.”
Women’s consumption of vegetables and pulses has been drastically curtailed due to high prices of essential commodities. To prove their point, some women at the workplace took out their lunch box, which contained rice or rotis and a chili sauce. Two sisters, Sheelavati and Chandramma said, “We drink water after eating chilli chutney. Then we don’t feel hungry.” Others nodded in agreement. They said that 10 kg of food grains per person per person from the free food program of the central and state governments was very helpful and they feared it would be wiped out. Due to high prices and low incomes. The reason women are deprived of nutrition is another dimension of the life of an ‘essential’ woman worker.
providing minimum wage
Almost every woman spoke of getting stuck in debt. What women earn from multiple jobs, for which there is no fixed piece rate, is in no way equal to the labor they do. The abolition of labor laws in urban areas has weakened the labor department. Implementation of minimum wages in rural India is possible only through strong movements of agricultural labor unions. While there should be strict implementation of minimum wages with fixed rates for various types of women labour, it is unfair that landless manual laborers in rural India are denied the pathetic government annual cash transfer of Rs 6,000 given to land-owning farmers. goes. While rural laborers should also be entitled to similar cash transfers, the schedule of rates based on impossibly high productivity rates for women in MGNREGA projects should be reduced and work sites made more labour-friendly.
With the deep penetration of capitalist processes into rural India, there is a crisis of livelihood options. To deal with this, poor women adopt different strategies. A sensitive lens is needed to properly analyze this crisis. The invisibility of women’s work can be removed through time use survey. For example, village-level time use surveys conducted by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies revealed the extent of women’s work. In fact, there is an urgent need for a comprehensive survey of poor rural women and how they spend their time. ‘Mandatory’ women activists should be recognized and protected by laws and policies that address their issues, while India celebrates its 75th year of independence.
Brinda Karat is a member of CPI(M) Politburo