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India’s recent gains in women’s employment and leadership reveal both expanding opportunities and the structural barriers that continue to shape economic agency.

The trends highlight a doubling of women in managerial roles alongside a rise in the rural female labour force participation rate (LFPR) to 45.9 percent. To what extent does this shift signal genuine improvements in job quality and decision-making power versus compositional effects within employment categories?

The rise in the rural female LFPR to 45.9 percent and the increase in women’s representation in managerial roles reflect meaningful progress in women’s economic visibility, but they do not indicate uniform improvements in employment quality or substantive decision-making power. A large share of the recent increase in women’s employment remains concentrated in self-employment and informal work, particularly in rural India. This creates an important distinction between numerical participation and substantive economic empowerment, especially where managerial designations may not always translate into operational authority, income security, or upward mobility within enterprises. 

India’s experience with corporate leadership illustrates both institutional progress and continuing gaps. Women currently hold around 17 percent of middle and senior management positions in India, compared to nearly 33 percent globally. The Companies Act, 2013, accelerated board-level representation by mandating at least one woman director for listed firms. Following the reform, the share of NSE-listed firms without a woman director declined from 53 percent to below 10 percent within a year, while women’s representation on boards rose to nearly 17 percent by 2021. 

At the same time, unpaid care responsibilities continue to shape women’s labour market choices and time allocation. NCAER research estimates that formalising part-time employment and reducing unpaid care burdens could raise India’s female LFPR by nearly 6 percentage points, from 37 percent to 43 percent. Sustained gains therefore depend on stronger labour protections, care infrastructure, and access to more secure forms of employment.   

The rise in rural female LFPR appears to be driven by expanding participation across agriculture, self-help groups, and local enterprises. How sustainable are these gains in the absence of deeper structural shifts toward non-farm, higher-productivity employment?

The recent increase in rural female LFPR represents an important shift in India’s labour market, but its long-term sustainability depends on whether participation is accompanied by structural transformation toward non-farm and more productive employment opportunities. Much of the recent increase in women’s work has emerged through agriculture, self-help groups, household enterprises, and informal economic activity, sectors that often provide low earnings, weak social protection, and limited upward mobility. 

This distinction matters because rising participation does not automatically imply durable labour market integration. Several studies and ILO estimates, show that women’s labour supply in developing economies can expand during periods of household economic stress, particularly through unpaid family work and informal employment. Such distress-led participation may improve labour force statistics without necessarily strengthening productivity, bargaining power, or income security. 

The structural limitations of agriculture reinforce these concerns. Fragmented landholdings, climate vulnerability, and underemployment reduce the sector’s long-run capacity to absorb labour productively. India continues to face a shortage of accessible opportunities for women in manufacturing and services. Sustaining current gains therefore requires investment in rural transport, childcare systems, digital infrastructure, skilling, and local enterprise ecosystems. 

Evidence from East and Southeast Asia suggests that durable increases in women’s employment have historically accompanied industrial diversification and labour-intensive manufacturing expansion. Public employment programmes and self-help groups can facilitate women’s entry into economic activity, while long-term sustainability depends on the broader expansion of productive private-sector employment.

The increase in women’s representation in managerial positions coexists with persistent gendered constraints in labour markets. How does this apparent divergence reshape the political economy of female labour participation?

The coexistence of rising female leadership and persistent labour market constraints reflects a central feature of India’s development trajectory. Women are increasingly visible across corporate boards, public institutions, and local governance structures, yet these advances have not translated proportionately into broad-based workforce inclusion. Leadership gains remain concentrated among a relatively small segment of educated women, while occupational mobility across much of the labour market continues to be shaped by social norms, mobility barriers, safety concerns, and unequal household responsibilities. 

Evidence increasingly suggests that women’s leadership influences institutional and developmental outcomes. IMF and NCAER research finds that a 20-percentage point increase in women’s parliamentary representation is associated with roughly a 0.4 percentage point increase in public health spending relative to GDP, alongside improvements in infant mortality, access to drinking water, and educational outcomes. India’s experience with Panchayati Raj reservations similarly demonstrated that women leaders increased investment in roads, drinking water infrastructure, and education. Research on NSE-listed firms also links greater female board representation and a higher proportion of women in senior management with stronger financial performance, improved workplace culture, and lower financial risk. 

Leadership visibility can also reshape aspirations and intra-household bargaining dynamics, particularly for younger women and girls. However, representation alone does not automatically diffuse across the wider labour market. Broader inclusion requires institutional support through childcare, transport, skilling, legal protections, and gender-sensitive workplace policies that enable women to participate more fully across sectors and occupational levels.

Ratna Sahay, Honorary Professor, Centre for Gender and Macroeconomy, National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER). Aakash Dev, Fellow, Centre for Gender and Macroeconomy, National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER). Views are personal.

Schools shift to online teaching during heat waves or pollution. Poor children suffer, as they cannot access instruction.

India’s education policy today rightly emphasises better learning outcomes, equitable and inclusive education, and the human capital required to achieve the country’s developmental goals. But for millions of children, the basic condition that makes all of this possible – uninterrupted schooling- is increasingly becoming a challenge.

This is different from school dropout, which is usually seen as the primary cause of learning disruption. The reasons for dropout are many in India, like poverty or social factors like child marriage and gender roles prioritising boys’ education, leaving girls to perform domestic chores, etc. This is particularly seen at the secondary level, where dropout rates are substantially higher than in primary schooling, and retention remains a challenge despite higher enrolment.

Environmental factors

Added to this is the problem of disruptions in schooling, mostly due to environmental factors, the COVID-19 pandemic being the exception in recent times. In recent years, schools in Delhi and across parts of North India have been repeatedly shut down due to severe air pollution. Across the country, schools face similar interruptions at different times of the year due to heatwaves, dense fog, heavy rainfall, cyclones and floods. On April 19, the Odisha government ordered schools in nine districts to remain shut for a few days from April 20 due to a heatwave warning.

For the current summer, IMD has already warned of severe above-normal heatwave days across several parts of the country during the April-June period. Such weather-induced disruptions show that school closures are no longer just a pandemic-era exception. It is becoming a recurring feature of educational life at a time of growing extreme climate shocks.

The problem is not only about schools being shut, but that the alternative is far from equal. For many children, a shift to online classes is not a smooth substitute for classroom learning, but it is just the beginning of exclusion. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic provides important evidence of how school closures widen educational inequalities.

Survey findings

Findings from the latest third round of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS-3), conducted in 2022–24, clearly capture this divide. Among children aged 5-15 who were enrolled during the pandemic, 52 per cent of those in private schools were offered online classes during the closure period, compared with only 30 per cent in government schools.

Similarly, 45 per cent of private-school students received educational videos or other online learning material, compared with just 25 per cent of government-school students. Most strikingly, 61 per cent of children in government schools reported that their school shared nothing at all, compared with 43 per cent in private schools. These findings reflect a wider national pattern, with a Ministry of Education report showing that in several large states, between 40 and 70 per cent of school-going children lacked access to digital devices during the pandemic.

Teachers’ accounts from the IHDS-3 survey help explain why this gap was so difficult to bridge. Among Grade 3 teachers, those in government schools were more likely than their private-school counterparts to report barriers such as poor electricity, weak internet access, and lack of devices – constraints that students themselves had to grapple with. They were also more likely to point to limited digital skills among students and parents, as well as home circumstances that hindered learning. Remote education fell short not only due to technological gaps, but also because learning from home was shaped by unequal household circumstances.

Closures do not create a temporary and uniform pause in learning; they produce an unequal shock. Children already studying in less advantaged settings are more likely to lose access to instruction altogether and less likely to recover quickly. Educational disruption, therefore, does not merely interrupt learning in the short term. It can deepen longer-term inequalities in human capital formation.

That is why the challenge goes beyond curriculum, teacher training, and school infrastructure, even though all of these are important. Such discussions often assume that schooling continues without interruption. But when environmental shocks repeatedly push children out of classrooms and into highly unequal home-based learning conditions, the central policy question becomes one of continuity: who can remain connected to learning when the school gates are shut?

E-initiatives

India is not short of digital education initiatives. PM eVIDYA was launched to provide multimodal access to education, while DIKSHA serves as a national platform for digital learning content. Samagra Shiksha has also expanded digital and ICT support within the broader school education framework, and NEP 2020 places clear emphasis on equitable and inclusive education. But the existence of schemes does not by itself guarantee continuity in learning. Where households lack stable connectivity, adequate devices, digital familiarity, or supportive learning environments, the children are unable to benefit from them.

As environmental disruptions become more frequent, measures for continuity in learning can no longer be treated as part of crisis management. They must be built into mainstream education policy through stronger digital access, low-tech alternatives, community-based support, and effective last-mile delivery. Otherwise, every school closure will widen the gap between children who can continue learning and those who cannot, turning such interruptions into inequality.

The writer is an Associate Fellow, NCAER – National Data Innovation Centre. Views expressed are personal.

In the fourth part of our series on India’s new labour reforms, Afridi and Talukder focus on the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 – in terms of its rationale, the key legislative changes that it entails, state-level implementation, and what the existing theoretical and empirical literature says about potential impacts. They contend that the Code is a structurally coherent reform that lowers the cost of formal hiring, extends protections to categories of workers who had none, and creates administrative data infrastructure for evidence-based enforcement. 

Of the four Labour Codes that came into effect on 1 April 2026, the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (OSHWC) Code, 2020 is perhaps the most structurally ambitious. India’s pre-existing occupational safety framework imposed meaningful safety, health, and welfare obligations on covered establishments, but the more persistent problem was one of fragmented architecture and uneven reach. Thirteen separate Acts governed different worker categories and thresholds, leaving many either outside formal coverage or subject to safety standards that existing inspector regimes rarely enforced in practice. The OSHWC Code thus is less a response to absent standards than to their uneven applications as it subsumes sector-specific legislation covering factories, mines, plantations, docks, construction, beedi and cigar workers, journalists, contract, and migrant workers under a single mandate.

The rationale is compelling in principle: simpler compliance lowers entry costs and increased licensing thresholds draw more firms into the formal economy, broadening the base of regulated employment. The implications, however, are more equivocal.

Key legislative changes under the OSHWC Code

The changes to the employment thresholds are the most consequential features of the OSHWC Code. It does not apply a single uniform threshold but uses different tiers by worker-counts. The factory definition threshold doubles from 10 to 20 workers for premises using power. The contractor licensing threshold rises from 20 to 50 workers, with license validity extended from one to five years.

Several other provisions represent stated advances over the previous regime. The standardisation and digitisation of employment documentation regardless of sector, annual health examinations for all workers above the age of 40, migrant portability, extension of night shifts for women, gender-inclusive facilities, and mandatory safety committees, all connotate procedurally meaningful progressions. The Shram Suvidha Portal now handles registration, returns, and accident reporting. Certificates are auto-generated within seven days if unprocessed. The Inspector-cum-Facilitator replaces the old inspectorate cadre, with cross-designation across all four Labour Codes and a mandate for risk-based rather than complaint-based inspection.

State-level implementation

The figure below shows when states have adopted the new Code, with 16 states notifying their OSHWC rules in 2021 alone, and all states except West Bengal having done so, as of April 2026.

Figure 1. State-wise timing of adoption of rules under the OSHWC Code

Source: Authors’ compilation based on state government gazette notifications on the OSHWC Rules issued by state labour departments (2020-2025).
Note: The map shows the variation in which states and union territories issued their draft or final rules. Where both draft and final rules were notified, the year of the first notification is reported.

Literature review

Given this premise, we take a cue from the legacy empirical and theoretical literature on labour regulation reforms in India and other economies, and postulate an expected pathway of employment and labour productivity implications. Our hypothesised channels are tabulated below.

Potential impact on employment

Table 1. Theoretical impact of the OSHWC Code on employment

‍Source: Authors’ compilation.

Theory thereby predicts that changes such as raising thresholds will not eliminate all distortions but rather shift the equilibrium outward. The corresponding empirical literature, drawn from quasi-experimental evaluations of previous legislations and state-level amendments, broadly validates these predictions (Aghion et al. 2008, Hasan and Jandoc 2012, Sapkal 2016). While a net positive effect on total employment is expected, recurring informalisation or increased contractualisation can undo gains in smaller sectors.

Potential impact on labour productivity

Parallelly, Table 2 below merges theory with their purported effect on worker productivity under the new OSHWC regulations.

Table 2. Theoretical implications of the OSHWC Code on worker productivity

‍Source: Authors’ compilation.

These implications are theoretically more unambiguous than the employment effects, but equally contingent on implementation capacity of enforcement, hazard governance, health surveillance and state-specific safety metrics to cover what the Central Code does not. The empirical evidence particularly on the safety-productivity trade-off also promises one of the strongest impacts of the Code on worker productivity, as long as we take into account safety improvement costs by the principle employer, inspection targeting and frequency, and penalty credibility for deterrents (Bossavie, Cho and Heath 2023).

Summary of potential impacts

Firm size thresholds and compliance costs: The OSHWC Code’s new obligations make formalisation easier and more expensive for the employer at the same time. For micro and small establishments, these may outweigh the productivity and profitability gains from formalisation, at least in the short run. The net employment effect, therefore, may depend critically on firm size, sector, and enforcement, none of which are uniform across India’s states.

Safety, health and labour productivity: Our deductions from the literature show how safer workplaces coupled with managerial effort can reduce injury-induced losses, lower absenteeism, and raise worker confidence. However, in India, weak judicial machinery can mean that gains are not automatic but depend on whether rules are actually followed. Mandatory health examinations can enable earlier detection of occupational disease that currently suppresses productivity invisibly. Hazard disclosure requirements can correct information asymmetry between employers and workers. The period of implementation will be the key.

Implementation and the State: Take for example, the extension of night work permissions for women, after 7 pm and before 6 am with consent, allowing women access to sectors previously unavailable to them. The Code imposes no corresponding obligation on employers to provide safe transport, shifting risk onto the worker while characterising that shift as expanded opportunity. Whether this translates into a labour supply gain or remains unrealised will depend on how state governments notify safety protocols that make the provision meaningful rather than notional.

Such implementation-dependent reforms create risk as well as opportunity. States with historically weak inspection capacity may find it harder to break out of the rent-extraction patterns of the old regime. States with higher concentrations in mining, chemicals, or plantations, such as Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Kerala, have the strongest incentive to notify granular, sector-specific hazard rules that go beyond the central worker protection baseline. They could serve as role models for other states.

Thus, the OSHWC Code is a structurally coherent reform that lowers the cost of formal hiring, extends protections to categories of workers who had none, and creates administrative data infrastructure for evidence-based enforcement that India’s labour market has long lacked. Initial compliance cost absorption may be difficult in sectors where OSHWC compliance was minimal. In the medium term, lower barriers to registration can generate positive employment effects in firms that expand above the formal threshold. Over a longer horizon, fewer workplace injuries and reduced turnover could enhance labour productivity.

The views expressed in this post are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the I4I Editorial Board.

Empires were once forged in iron and fuelled by coal; today, they may fracture over elements most people cannot spell.

Empires were once forged in iron and fuelled by coal; today, they may fracture over elements most people cannot spell. In the circuitry of the modern economy, power no longer flows only through oil wells and steel plants, but through trace materials embedded deep within semiconductors, fibre optics, and defence systems. Among these quiet enablers, Germanium and Gallium occupy an outsized role. They are the backstage crew of the digital age, rarely seen, yet indispensable to the performance.

India’s industrial ambitions, from 5G expansion to semiconductor fabrication, are, in many ways, tethered to these “invisible inputs.” But herein lies the rub: what is invisible in discourse often becomes invisible in policy. Germanium is the unsung hero of fibre optics and infrared technologies; gallium is the beating heart of next-generation chips powering electric vehicles, radar systems, AI and high-speed communications. These are not mere commodities; they are foundational inputs into high-technology systems. Yet, unlike oil or coal, they do not arrive in volumes that command policy attention. They move quietly through global trade channels, often as by-products of zinc and bauxite processing.

Their supply chains are complex, and disruptions, though less visible, can have disproportionate consequences for sectors such as telecommunications, electronics, and defence manufacturing. The strategic concern is not just about resource availability, but about where processing takes place. China’s dominance in germanium and gallium extends beyond mining to refining and downstream processing. This concentration creates a structural asymmetry in global supply chains.

Recent export restrictions illustrate how control over processing can translate into geopolitical leverage. For import-dependent economies, including India, the risk is not merely price volatility but potential supply constraints in critical sectors, thereby determining the fate of India’s futuristic industries. India currently relies on imports of processed forms of these materials, often from a limited set of countries, and China dominates in that set. This dependence drives us to rethink in a geopolitical environment where supply chains are increasingly shaped by strategic considerations rather than purely market forces. India has some upstream linkages; germanium can be recovered during zinc refining, and gallium during alumina production.

India is pushing semiconductor manufacturing (PLI schemes), but no gallium refining – an incomplete value chain, and thereby ended up assembling the intrinsic chip (IC) mostly. Despite having bauxite and aluminium reserves and some zinc capacity, India lacks mining and refining infrastructure, leaving these opportunities underutilised. As a result, India’s participation is largely confined to the downstream end of the supply chain. This limits both strategic autonomy and economic gains from high-value segments of production. A related challenge is the lack of granular tracking. These materials are often embedded within broader trade classifications under the Harmonised System (HS), making it difficult to assess import dependence with precision.

Without better data visibility, policy interventions risk being delayed or misaligned. Given the constraints in domestic reserves, India’s most viable pathway is to strengthen its position in midstream processing and material recovery. This includes: Extracting trace elements from existing industrial processes (such as zinc and aluminium production) Investing more in recycling systems, particularly for electronic waste Developing technological capabilities for refining high-purity materials This approach is both feasible and strategically relevant.

Countries that lack large reserves have successfully built competitiveness by specialising in processing and value addition. For India, such investments would reduce supply risks while enabling greater participation in global value chains. The current geopolitical context, marked by efforts to diversify supply chains, creates an opportunity for India. By developing processing capacity, India can move beyond being a passive importer and position itself as a reliable intermediary in critical mineral supply chains. This would allow India to play a dual role: securing its domestic industrial needs while offering processing capabilities to partner countries seeking alternatives to concentrated supply sources. In doing so, India can strengthen its bargaining position and expand its role in emerging industrial ecosystems.

To enable this transition, three policy priorities stand out: Investment in processing infrastructure: Targeted support for refining and recovery technologies Improved trade intelligence: Better tracking of critical materials through disaggregated HS classifications Strategic partnerships: Securing feedstock through international collaborations and long-term, effective agreements For India, the challenge is not just to secure supplies of materials like germanium and gallium, but to integrate more deeply into the value chains that define their use. Without such a shift, industrial ambitions may remain exposed to external vulnerabilities. With it, India can move towards a more resilient and strategically positioned role in the global economy.

The writers are, respectively, a Research Associate and a Professor at the National Council of Applied Economic Research. Views expressed here are personal.