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Contents:

Women: A Status report

This report is is partly an extract from an Article by Shri. C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh, which appeared in Business Line of September 3^rd 2002 and partly on the basis of the analyses made by us as part of the project and on the basis of ground interventions made in the area of promoting gender equality and women & girls’ empowerment in the districts of Chittorgarh and Bhilwara.

The process of gender equality and women’s empowerment has been in vogue from a long time both in terms of specific ground interventions in various places all over India and also through a number of policy interventions.  The 73^rd Amendment is one noteworthy policy initiative to ensure greater women’s participation in the governance process and in their empowerment, to quote one of the many such policy interventions. 

However, despite all this, the process of gender equality and women’s empowerment has still a long way to go.  The reason for this is quite well known given the kind of societal pattern in the country.  However, from the view point of budget analyses and policy analyses, it seems that the targeted schemes tend to have only limited impact when the basic thrust of macroeconomic schemes is operating in a direction which makes most women’s material lives more fragile and vulnerable.

There are many ways in which macroeconomic policies and processes directly affect the economic and other conditions facing women.

In a positive sense, public infrastructure investment can directly feed into the lives and working conditions of women. Providing safe drinking water supply and better sanitation not only directly improves the lives and health of women but also reduces their workload in terms of provisioning and ensuring such facilities. Similarly, access to affordable cooking fuel reduces the need to travel long distances and spend hours collecting fuel-wood.

Over the time, this may lead to access to a wider range of goods and services that can also reduce un-paid labour involved in housework. Cut down in such expenditures, or in the maintenance if existing public infrastructure assets and services, can have the opposite effects, leading to worsening conditions and more unpaid work for women.

The issue of user charges for infrastructure services and utilities is also crucial; expenditure on food subsidy, and in particular on the PDS (Public Distribution System), directly affects the lives of women and girl children in term of access to adequate nutrition.

A small change in a macro policy of this type such as raising the issue prices of PDS food leading to higher prices in ration shops, can have more significant effects than the entire gamut of nutrition schemes directed towards women. Along with fiscal policies, monetary policies also play important, if more indirect, roles in affecting the material conditions and context for women.

Financial liberalisation, the need to reserve the confidence of international markets, and so on, all contribute to constraints on public expenditure and to domestic deflationary policies which affect both the delivery of public services and the generation of income-earning opportunities in the economy. These directly affect women as workers, consumers, household provisioners and major participants in the care economy.

This makes it clear that macro economic policies in general have important and differential effects on the condition of women. The facts are again proven by analysis of some of the data indicating status of women in terms of demographic indicators of health and living conditions.

The decade of 1990s was the time when government schemes specially for women were given a better scope then ever before.

The relative position of women in terms of conditions of survival-life expectancy and sex ratio is presented below:

Status Report 

Sex ratio

Ø    The life expectancy of women has improved at a faster rate than that of men, so that by the mid-1990s, women in India had greater expectation of longevity than by men.

Ø    While the aggregate sex ratio or all ages improved between 1991 and 2001, at the later period it was still lower than the level of 1981, showing thereby a long term decline. And the sex ratio for the 0-6 years age cohort has declined continuously and quite substantially. 

Ø    The sex ratios for the total population by State for 2001 and the sex ratios for children in the age group of 0-6 years shows very substantial variation across States. The lowest sex ratio is in Delhi. The State is the most urbanised and the most developed among the other states. In contrast, Kerala with much lower per capita income shows the best sex ratio at 1,058 women per 1000 men. Rajasthan, the state where we are working shows sex ratio of 922 women per 1000 men.  

Ø    The data show that several of the States that are economically less developed perform better than the average by these indicators.

Infant Mortality Rate

Ø    Infant Mortality rates have declined but the data also show that the rate of decline has decelerated over the 1990s. This is shown in aggregate IMRs for rural and urban areas respectively.

Ø    The aggregate infant mortality rate for males fell by 26 percent between 1981 and 1991 (from 110 per thousand to 81 thousand) but only by 12 percent over the subsequent decade, to 70 per thousand.

Ø    The deceleration in infant mortality among girls over the decades was even sharper, from 27 percent to 10 percent, such that the female IMR was 72 per thousand in 2001.

Ø    Some states have very high female IMRs ranging from 96.9 per thousand in Orissa to 81.4 per thousand in Haryana in 1998-99. Th female IMR in Madhya Pradesh in the same year was as high as 101.5 per thousand.

Death Rates     

Ø    Death rates during the first five years of life also show very significant gender differentials. In 1998-99, the national average child mortality rate (CMR) was 29.3 per thousand. However, the CMR for rural boys was 27.9, while that of rural girls was one-and-a-half times higher at 41.7.

Ø    The urban gender differential was somewhat less: the urban CMR for boys was 14.6 while that for girls was 19.7.

Ø    In 1996 CMR was higher in Rjasthan (31 for the state, 34 and 20 for rural and urban areas respectively) than across the nation. The highest percentage difference between the state and the nation in respect to infant and child mortality rates was recorded by CMRs (29 percent; 31 percent in rural areas and 43 percent in urban areas).

Ø    Between 1981 and 1991 Rajasthan recorded a decrease in IMR of 38 percent (from 141 to 87), which was higher than of the national average (33 percent). Rajasthan’s performance in terms of decline in female IMR was again better (41.5 percent) than that for India as a whole (26.9 perent). On the other hand, while the rate of decline in IMR Rajasthan was higher than that for India, the absolute levels of IMR in the state where unacceptably high.   

Ø    The districts of Rajasthan that register comparatively higher progress in decline in infant mortality between 1981 and 1991 had relatively lower differentials in the rate of decline between male and female IMR. The gender gap in the decline in IMR was 81 percent in Jhunjunu, 63 percent in Sawai Madhopur, 125 percent in Dholpur, 85 percent in Jaipur and 122 percent in Sikar.

Ø    The district wise CMR was lowest in Ganganagar (73), Sikar (78), Jhunjunu (80), Bikaner (82) and Churu (83). The sharp inter-district and regional variations in vital rates indicate that the health system has performed with varying degrees of efficacy within the state, and that overall it has performed poorly as compared to other states and India. In order to investigate reasons for this lag in Rajasthan, it is necessary to appraise the institutional mechanism of public health in State. 

Maternal Mortality Rates  

Ø    Maternal mortality rates reflect health infrastructure conditions as well as other factors such as maternal nutrition levels. It is disturbing to observe that the rate of decline of maternal mortality has been very slow in India.

Ø    Maternal mortality for the country as a whole was estimated at 580 per 100,000 live births in the early 1990s. There are significant rural-urban differentials. Similarly, there are wide variations across States, as evident from the data.

Ø    The extent of data varies from 738 in Orissa to only 87 in Kerala. The low MMR in Kerala indicates how much can be achieved through the greater spread of improved public health facilities and provision of basic nutrition through the public distribution system (PDS).

Literacy and Education     

Ø    In terms of literacy and education India contains the largest number of illiterate people in the world. The largest number of illiterate women are also in India.

Ø    According to the data, the progress of literacy is very slow. Literacy among females is substantially below that for males. 
      Nearly, half of the female population remains illiterate. The difference of female literacy from 1981 to 1991 was 9.5 percent, 
      whereas, that for Rajasthan was 5.9 percent. This difference increased to 15 percent for India and 23.6 percent for 
      Rajasthan state during 1991-2001, showing an accelerated rate of progress.  

Ø    In Rajasthan, during the years 1985-86 to 1995-96, the range of share of girls in total enrolment (Pre-primary & Primary) 
       varies from lowest of 27 to 36.8. While hat for the upper primary, the percentage varies from 19.7 to 33.3 percent. 

 Women as Labour Force

Ø   There had been some major shifts in patterns of employment, especially in the rural areas. There has been a substantial 
     decline in the share of agriculture and a rise in the share of non-agriculture in employment. This could be a positive sign of 
     progress and diversification, but it was associated with a fairly large drop in work participation rates of both men and women, 
     which indicated a deceleration in aggregate employment growth. This is confirmed by data emerging from Census 2001.

Ø   The data show that main employment growth collapsed in rural areas over the decade of the 1990s.

Ø    In terms of wage workers, as the data show, for most categories of employment in both rural and urban areas is quite marked: usually it results from employment of women in different, and lower paying activities in the aggregate.

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