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Time of India
6 hours ago
- Politics
- Time of India
For tomorrow's sake
Times of India's Edit Page team comprises senior journalists with wide-ranging interests who debate and opine on the news and issues of the day. Women at the frontlines, men in the kitchen Indian women remain officially excluded from frontline combat roles. But led by Assistant Commandant Neha Bhandari, half a dozen women BSF personnel deployed at the international border in Akhnoor, found themselves defending two forward posts during Op Sindoor. Seizing this opportunity, they battled heavy Pak fire for three days and nights, leaving their post only after forcing the enemy to retreat. The first co-ed batch has also graduated from NDA. These developments mark women overcoming some of the most entrenched resistance in society's prestige roles. What's weird is how widely women are still waiting for their 'firsts'. India has never had a woman CJI. Many Indian cities are yet to see a woman cabbie, in many others there are few women behind the wheel at all. If their representation remains sparse across vast civilian spaces, it is not because of formal rules or regulations. These can be as gender evolved as in Scandinavia, but also a total chimera. Because our social norms remain of a medieval variety. Statistics ministry's new Time Use Survey says this starkly. Female participation in 'food and meals management and preparation' is 76%, male 6%. So, though women's literacy has expanded to 77% from 9% at Independence, their domestic shackles haven't loosened much. This is why India's 37% female labour force participation shamefully lags Japan's 55%, China's 60% and Vietnam's 63%. However much this hurts the nation's growth, the drag on individuals is more acutely painful. Young women don't just have to find a job in a tough job market, they have to beg their family to let them do it. And now, AI is about to remake the jobscape. The only way for India to ride this sea change is to let women navigate it on strong, independent terms. As for meals, the men better cook their fair share. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Times of India.
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Business Standard
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: Why acting early matters in both policy and life
There's a strange kind of hesitation we all carry. A loose thread on a favourite shirt. A creeping pain in the back molar. A message we keep meaning to send. Tiny thorns, really. But left alone, they fester. Till the shirt tears, the tooth aches, and the friendship sours. We're often so desperate to avoid discomfort that we let it multiply. But if there's one universal truth, it's this: pulling the thorn early hurts less than pretending it's not there. Let's dive in. Take India's long-stretched journey to self-reliant defence. After decades of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited flying solo, and often flying late, the Defence Ministry has finally brought in a new model for the fifth-gen stealth AMCA jet project. Public and private players can now jointly bid, ending HAL's monopoly, notes our first editorial. It's a thorn pulled early, a move that may sting HAL today but promises faster skies tomorrow. But while the sky opens up, the ground drowns. The monsoon's rude early arrival on May 26 swamped Mumbai, again. Warning systems blinked red, but drains were already clogged, trains already halted. The rains don't wait for infrastructure excuses. And with 70–80 per cent of our urban water bodies vanished, as our second editorial highlights, Indian cities can't afford to delay climate-resilient planning any longer. Monsoon pain is no longer seasonal; it's systemic. And the longer we postpone climate action, the deeper the rot will set. Globally, thorns are sprouting fast. Amita Batra writes how Trump's tariff tantrums have flung trade into chaos. Allies, rivals, even US firms are unsure which sector gets hit next. Mini-deals and retaliatory tariffs now dominate the trade discourse. Instead of trying to dodge each jab, the world may need new, rules-based trade formats, ones that can hold up even when leaders don't. But how we spend our days also shapes what thorns we choose to ignore. Amitava and Gopal Saha, analysing the latest Time Use Survey, show how India's youth are spending more time working and less on self-care or socialising. Women, despite entering the workforce in growing numbers, still carry the weight of unpaid domestic work. Until that imbalance is addressed, gender equality remains just a polite fiction. Finally, Neha Bhatt reviews Deconstructing India's Democracy: Essays in Honour of James Manor, a timely reminder that Indian democracy too carries deep thorns: centralisation, shrinking civil liberties, and majoritarian politics. But its essays argue that hope lies in resistance, decentralisation, and reimagining the liberal idea. It's a call to action — not in comfort, but in urgency. Stay tuned and remember, waiting doesn't numb the thorn, it only infects the wound!
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Business Standard
3 days ago
- General
- Business Standard
Indian youth spend more time on work, women continue to get a raw deal
In 2019, out of the 1,440 minutes in a day, Indian youth spent 148 minutes on employment-related activities, which increased to 158 minutes in 2024 Amitava Saha Gopal Saha Listen to This Article Time Use Survey (TUS) plays a pivotal role in understanding how individuals across different age groups and gender participate in paid and unpaid activities. TUS data depicts how gender norms and societal roles influence the way men and women divide their time, both within the household and in broader society. Recognising the importance of unpaid work by women, the United Nations, in its 2030 agenda for Sustainable Development, has introduced an indicator for measuring the 'proportion of time spent on unpaid domestic and care work, by sex, age, and location,' to track progress towards gender equality and women empowerment.
Mint
4 days ago
- General
- Mint
The unpaid burden: For Indian women, degrees don't ease household chores
It's no secret that Indian women are overburdened with unpaid housework. Those who expect relief from this by getting a college degree or earning a lot are likely to be disappointed. Tending to domestic chores and caring for family members leaves many Indian women with little time to join the formal workforce. But even those who are able to get a job don't get relief from unpaid housework. This is evident from a Mint analysis of granular data from the government's second pan-India Time Use Survey, conducted in 2024. The nationally representative survey, which covered over 167,000 respondents, helps us sketch what a day in the life of the average Indian looks like. Gender divide, by the clock The survey records the time Indians spend on 165 specific activities across 56 groups. The list is comprehensive, ranging from paid work, sleep, eating and leisure to reading, shopping and cooking. The analysis shows men and women spend roughly the same amount of time sleeping, but that's where the similarity ends. The average Indian woman spends more time in a day managing the household's meals than the average man spends talking and socialising. Also read: How a manufacturing boom could help India close the gender gap Working in a formal job or self-employment is the most dominant non-sleep activity for men, taking up an average of 4.6 hours (rural) and 5.3 hours (urban) in a day. This is followed by activities related to leisure and socialising. Among women, tasks related to preparing and serving meals are the lengthiest, covering 2.7 hours a day, while employment takes up just over an hour on average. Note that the average 'time spent' reported here covers all individuals, including those who do not engage in the said activity at all. If they are excluded, the average time spent will be higher. However, an overall average, as we are reporting, is a combined indicator of whether – as well as how much – an individual engages in a particular activity. This is a stark reflection of traditional gender roles. While these norms are being challenged, there has been no remarkable change to the dynamics. This is reflected in India's low female labour participation rate of 41.7% for those aged 15 years and above in 2024-25, as against 78.8% for men. There is enough evidence of women facing gender-related barriers, low pay and supply-side constraints in finding or remaining in the right job. Women's 'double shift' at work Women have made great strides in education and breaking gender barriers, but haven't benefited much from this, it seems. If traditional gender roles require men to go to work and women to tend to the home, then the total time spent on both tasks—paid work and unpaid work—could be a useful measure of equality at home. But combining both paid and unpaid work, women still outdo men in terms of time spent working, regardless of education level or socio-economic status. Let's take education first. Uneducated women, on average, spend a little over 103 minutes a day on employment and related activities, and 281 minutes on unpaid work. Women with at least a graduate degree spend 106 minutes on employment, and a much higher 323 minutes on unpaid work. Also read: Why business schools hold the key to bridging the gender gap In both cases, they surpass men's average total time on paid and unpaid activities by 24-36 minutes, suggesting that even though women play a smaller role in the formal job market, they do more work overall. The trend is similar across classes: women from the top 20% quintile in terms of consumption expenditure spend more hours on average on paid work, and get little leeway on unpaid work. Women across classes spend about 280 minutes a day on unpaid labour, while men across classes spend about 35-40 minutes on it. The minuscule amount of time men spend on unpaid labour reduces their overall time spent on work, despite their formal work taking up to five hours on average. While girls and women have better enrolment ratios than boys and men at several education levels, it's clear that they play a smaller role in the job market. Many economists and policymakers have argued that the burden of household activities often keeps them out of the formal job market. Claudia Goldin, the 2023 Nobel laureate, showed in her paper studying 200 years of US job market data that it was the burden of unpaid work, particularly motherhood, that had led to gender differences in the labour market. She also noted that the availability of contraceptive pills and the emergence of service sector jobs had played a positive role in countering these realities. Progress in India, however, has been slow. Also read | Elusive gender diversity: PSUs the biggest culprits Shuja Asrar contributed to this story. The next part of this series will explore how marriage affects the lives of Indian women and men differently.
Indian Express
03-05-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
Opinion In India's cooperative boom, women need to be at the centre, not the margins
Women have been written out of the history of cooperatives in India. While the formal history of cooperatives is more than 100 years old, dating back to 1904, when the Cooperative Credit Societies Act was passed in pre-independent India, the practice of cooperation and cooperatives' activities is considered more than 1,000 years old in the country. There are many documented examples from all parts of the country of resources like food grains or funds being pooled by groups to lend to members, who included men and women. Women were integral to kuries and bhishis, the earliest forms of chit funds, which originated in the Malabar region of Kerala and in Kolhapur in Maharashtra. Women formed the groups, managed finances and distributed funds. Those women who could not contribute funds contributed grains by saving a fistful of rice from every meal. However, women's contribution to these ancient cooperative practices is a footnote that has barely been examined. This may explain why women are relegated to the margins in modern cooperatives. There has been a renewed focus on cooperatives since the Covid pandemic and rising global challenges like climate change and conflicts, which have drawn attention to livelihoods and the need for inclusive growth and sustainable development amidst economic uncertainty. The United Nations has declared 2025 the International Year of Cooperatives with the theme 'Cooperatives Build a Better World'. The launch of the International Year of Cooperatives, was held in India in November 2024 — fittingly, as India has been taking the lead in promoting and strengthening cooperatives from the top levels of government since the new Ministry of Cooperation was formed in 2021. Cooperatives, by their very model of being people-centred enterprises, owned and controlled by members and based on their economic and social needs, are suitable for women, who face a higher threshold to enter the economy globally. This is particularly acute in India, which despite its rapidly growing economy has chronically low labour force participation by women. Women in India also face severe time poverty — females spend 16.4 per cent of their time on unpaid domestic work in a day, whereas the figure is just 1.7 per cent for males, the new Time Use Survey (January-December 2024) conducted by the National Statistics Office shows. This keeps them from participating in paid work. India has one of the largest cooperative movements in the world, with about 8.5 lakh cooperatives in the country, of which the share of women-only cooperatives is 2.52 percent, according to a 2023 report by Niti Aayog. The number is surprisingly low, considering women's participation in cooperatives has been highly visible, with successful initiatives like SEWA (a trade union with 3.2 million self-employed women), Amul (3.6 million women dairy farmers as members) and Lijjat (which introduced decentralised production for 45,000 female members to produce and earn from home). Numerous studies show that cooperatives have helped rural women to improve their financial literacy and entrepreneurship skills, and increase their savings and household incomes. Aside from economic empowerment, India's experience shows that cooperatives have been instrumental in enabling women to gain social and political empowerment while also improving their access to essential services like banking, housing, insurance, health, nutrition, education and childcare. Cooperatives help women access social capital through networks of trust, reciprocity and collective action, which in turn help build resilience. Ministry of Cooperation data from 2023 showed that out of 24,264 women's cooperatives, only 10,806 were functional, while the rest were dormant or under liquidation. Madhya Pradesh had the highest number of women's cooperatives, followed by Rajasthan, Assam and Telangana. The ministry has taken initiatives to support women's participation in mixed cooperatives, where the average male-to-female ratio is 74:26, and there is persistent underrepresentation of women in leadership roles. New guidelines mandate the reservation of two seats for women on the board of multi-state cooperative societies and the presence of women directors on the board of primary agricultural credit societies. The ministry is also providing affordable loans to women's cooperatives along with training and business expansion workshops. It is not yet known how effective these initiatives have been but they may not be enough to plug the gaps. The unusually high number of dormant women's cooperatives (11,869), demonstrates that women face barriers in maintaining and sustaining them. Most women's cooperatives are small, have limited resources and are nearly invisible to policymakers. Women members have limited access to education, skills training and financial literacy. They are also restricted by cultural norms like the burden of unpaid work and limited mobility, particularly in rural areas. A 2021 study on a women's dairy cooperative in Punjab brought out how members were lacking in confidence and decision-making skills and sought constant handholding from official functionaries for the administration of their cooperative. Most women's cooperatives need professional support and supervision to establish themselves and continue to function effectively, show studies by SEWA. There are green shoots of hope for women's cooperatives. Increased digitisation is expanding access to markets for women while growing recognition of the care economy by policymakers addresses women's time poverty by advocating for care services and infrastructure. Cooperatives have the potential to transform rural economies and to empower women. The International Year of Cooperatives provides the impetus to put the necessary frameworks in place.
