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Law will remain powerless, unless women speak up.

The Constitution guarantees equality, dignity, and protection from violence, and the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005) provides a legal framework. Yet, when women do not name their suffering, these protections lose their power. Until women can speak up fearlessly — in homes, workplaces, and streets — laws and policies will remain hollow words wrapped in moral pride.

In countless Indian homes, silence speaks louder than words. It is not the quiet of peace, but the silence that follows hurt — the silence of women who have been taught that obedience is virtue, that endurance is strength, and that a husband’s anger is an expression of care. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) exposes the depth of this belief. Nearly half of Indian women (45 per cent) and men (44 per cent) believe a husband is justified in beating his wife under certain circumstances — if she argues, neglects duties, or disobeys elders.

These are not just statistics; they are reflections of how culture shapes conscience. When violence becomes commonplace, law becomes ornamental. Given how deeply violence is normalised in Indian homes, many women may not even identify what they experience as violence. NFHS, for all its rigour, measures what women dare to disclose — not what they are conditioned to endure.

When culture outruns law

In my fieldwork across Assam during 2023-24, I met women who spoke of violence as routine, not as a violation. When asked about coercion or control, some smiled nervously, calling it “part of married life.” To name it as violence, they said, would be dangerous — both emotionally and socially. “He hits only when angry,” one woman told me, as if that were a kind of restraint.

Across the world, women remain quiet not because they accept abuse, but because they fear stigma, economic ruin, or ostracism. Silence be-comes a strategy for survival. The Constitution guarantees equality, dignity, and protection from violence, and the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005) provides a legal framework. But culture quietly cancels out constitutional rights. NFHS-5 data show that 32 percent of ever-married women aged 18-49 have experienced physical, sexual, or emotional spousal violence, yet only 14 per cent have ever sought help. Patriarchy, in its most enduring form, operates not through overt control but through habit — through jokes, rituals, and silence.

In India, women begin to speak only when others — especially celebrities — begin to speak. When a public figure names violence, thousands of ordinary women find a language for what they have long felt. Why must women wait for someone powerful to speak first? The deeper change must be one that allows every woman, whether in a city office ora rural courtyard, to say without hesitation, ‘this is not acceptable’.

Education and economic independence are essential, but they are not sufficient. Educated women can still be silent, and economically independent women can still be controlled. The true transformation must go beyond material empowerment to cultivate social courage — the courage to challenge norms that glorify female endurance and condemn resistance as rebellion.

This courage must be nurtured from the family outward. Homes must teach boys that respect is strength, not weakness. Schools must include empathy, consent, and equality as part of civic learning. The media must portray women who resist without ridiculing them, and and men who accord respect should not be mocked. Institutions must treat women’s testimonies not with suspicion but with solidarity. Above all, society must learn to listen when women speak — not to question their motives, not to doubt their pain, and not to dismiss their words as exaggeration. True freedom will flow not from the letter of the law but from thevoice of women who resist silence.

The writer is Fellow, National Council of Applied Economic Research(NCAER). Views are personal.

Such reform can make India’s infrastructure spending equitable apart from being efficient.

Summary

• Public infrastructure evaluations often overlook intangible benefits like improved health and social stability.
• Traditional metrics focus on direct outputs, missing the broader impacts on welfare and productivity.
• Integrating social indices and participatory metrics can lead to more informed policy decisions and equitable infrastructure investments.

Public infrastructure has long been judged by visible metrics — kilometres of canals dug or roads built and megawatts generated. Yet the most profound impacts of infrastructure often lie beneath the surface: The health of a child drinking clean water, a family choosing not to migrate to on finding local work, or the time a woman saves each day because irrigation or electricity reduces her burden of manual labour.

India’s development accounting still under-values these intangible or indirect benefits — outcomes that cannot be neatly tabulated but powerfully shape welfare, productivity and resilience.

In large public investments, evaluation frameworks typically stop at direct outputs: Hectares irrigated, households electrified, villages connected. Such metrics help track implementation but fail to capture the social and institutional multipliers that make infrastructure transformative.

For instance, an irrigation project does not merely increase crop yields. It stabilises farm incomes, improves nutritional diversity, reduces waterborne disease, encourages education (because children no longer fetch water) and even deepens women’s participation in self-help groups and local governance. When these linkages remain invisible in appraisal models, projects appear less rewarding than they truly are — skewing policy priorities and funding away from high-impact areas.

Cost of ignoring the intangible

Two systemic reasons explain why intangible benefits are omitted.
First, the conventional cost–benefit analysis (CBA) used in government planning relies on market-priced outputs. Anything without a clear market value — like reduced drudgery, environmental restoration or institutional trust — gets excluded. Second, data systems rarely collect the micro-evidence required to value such effects. Administrative records report physical progress, not behavioural change.

This narrow accounting has real fiscal consequences. It can make socially valuable projects appear economically inefficient, while projects with immediate but shallow pay-offs seem more attractive.

In irrigation, for example, excluding health and social gains can reduce the estimated economic internal rate of return by several percentage points — leading to under-investment in water infrastructure just when climate variability demands more.

Evidence from the field

Recent studies by National Council of Applied Economic Research demonstrate why the paradigm must shift. The ongoing evaluation of 57 major irrigation projects across 21 states shows that benefits radiate far beyond farm level benefits, in which the sample households in the project area reported lower incidence of diarrhoeal illness, higher school attendance of their children, greater women’s participation in community institutions, along with lower distress migration compared to non-project areas. When these outcomes were expressed through composite social indices and linked to household income effects, the true social return on irrigation investments rose dramatically. 

How can planners systematically capture the unmeasured? Three complementary approaches are emerging:

• Composite indices for social benefits: By combining indicators on health, education, gender, and environmental resilience, one can construct a Social Benefit Index alongside the conventional Economic Benefit Index. Normalising and weighting these components allow comparison across projects and regions.
• Monetisation through proxy valuation: Techniques such as avoided-cost valuation (such as cost of treating illness avoided due to cleaner water) or time-savings valuation (such as value of women’s labour saved) can translate intangible outcomes into monetary terms.
• Participatory and perceptual metrics: Integrating beneficiary perceptions through structured surveys and focus groups help quantify qualitative gains — like empowerment, trust, or reduced vulnerability — which traditional datasets slip.
• Together, these tools can make evaluation frameworks more holistic without sacrificing rigour.

Call for new evaluation architecture

The shift toward measuring intangible benefits is not just a technical refinement; it is a governance reform. When policymakers recognise social and environmental externalities, funding priorities change.

Projects that deliver community well-being, gender equity or ecological balance gain legitimacy even if their immediate financial yield is modest. Moreover, quantifying intangibles builds public accountability — taxpayers see not only what was built but also what changed in people’s lives.

The global discourse is moving this way. The World Bank’s “Beyond the Gap” framework and the OECD’s well-being indicators both urge countries to look beyond GDP or asset creation. India, with its rich tradition of social planning and Panchayati Raj, is well-placed to lead this evolution by embedding social accounting in its infrastructure evaluations.

To institutionalise this change, three steps are crucial:

• Integrate intangible metrics in detailed project reports (DPR) and appraisals. Every DPR should include a template for assessing non-market benefits, backed by guidelines from NITI Aayog and the Union Ministry of Finance.
• Create a national repository of impact evaluations. Collating primary data on social, health and environmental outcomes across projects will allow cross-sectoral learning.
• Invest in statistical and capacity-building infrastructure. Enumerators, local governments, and research partners need training in participatory evaluation and data harmonisation methods.

If implemented, such reforms can revolutionise how India allocates trillions in infrastructure spending — making it not only efficient but also equitable.

Capturing intangible benefits is not an academic luxury; it is an ethical and developmental imperative. Only when our bridges, canals and roads are evaluated not just by where they lead, but by how far they carry people toward a better life, can we truly say that our infrastructure is taking India forward.

Saurabh Bandyopadhyay is a senior fellow, Laxmi Joshi a fellow and Kushagra Thakral a research associate at the National Council of Applied Economic Research.

Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.

The focus of agricultural reform must be to bridge the gaps between men and women, traditional and modern practices, unpaid labour and entrepreneurship.

The paradox in the agriculture sector is glaring — the share of agricultural GVA (crops and irrigation) in All-India Gross Value Added (GVA) in2022-23 was 10 per cent whereas the share of workers during the same period was 35 per cent. The sector offers much potential for growth and productivity improvements. One of the channels for that is through skilling of workers. However, demand for skilled workers is an indirect demand, that is, it is dependent on the products that are being produced. India’s agriculture is very diverse because of its many climates, soils, and regions. The country is divided into 15 agroclimatic zones, each with different soil types and weather conditions that support different crops. Designing a top-down strategy to assess skill shortage and gaps would be erroneous.

That idea drove the work in the MSDE-NCAER’s National Skill Gap Study for High Growth Sectors (2025). The objective in that report was to develop a unified dynamic framework for assessing skills shortages and gaps in the country. This framework could either be applied to sectors or States/districts. The framework was developed using seven high growth sectors. One of them was the ‘growing of cereals, leguminous crops and oilseeds.

The key sectoral results from the report are given here:

The agricultural value chain — where skills meet technology: A modern agricultural economy is not built in the field alone; it spans a value chain stretching from crop planning to final market delivery. Agri-tech and agro-tech both define the sector. At each stage, digital technologies that are reshaping the possibilities are discussed here (Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmer Welfare 2021):

(a) Crop planning now leverages AI, machine learning, and big data, with soil testing labs and agri-tech start-ups offering precision recommendations. Farmers, however, need training to interpret and adopt these insights.

(b) Cultivation increasingly involves smart tractors, drones, and IoT sensors that monitor soil and crop health. Yet, without skilled machine operators, extension agents, and credit facilitators, adoption remains limited.

(c) Harvesting has shifted from manual reaping to mechanised harvesters, but women farmers are rarely trained to use these machines, excluding them from efficiency gains.

(d) Supply chain and markets are embracing blockchain for traceability, big data for price forecasting, and AI for logistics. Still, at the mandi level, workers handling grading, packing, and quality testing lack systematic training.

Workforce characteristics (PLFS 2022-23): Overall, 35 per cent of work-ers in the sector were not literate. Almost all the workers had not received any technical education. 32.2 per cent of workers had received non-formal vocational education, mostly through hereditary means. This inheritance-based skill transfer, while valuable for traditional practices, leaves farmers ill-prepared for modern farming systems that de-mand literacy in digital tools, market intelligence, and climate-smart agriculture. This mismatch is stark: while technology gallops ahead, skills lag behind, creating bottlenecks in productivity and inclusion.

Occupations: Among the number of jobs, 70 per cent of the jobs were in the occupational role of market gardeners and crop growers. Twenty percent of the workers are agricultural, forestry and fishery labourers. Nine per cent of the workers were subsistence crop farmers.

Engagement: Majority of the workers were self-employed. As much as39.5 per cent of workers were own-account workers; 3.2 per cent, employ-ers; 19 per cent, casual wage labour; and 38.2 per cent, unpaid family workers.

Women farmers — the invisible backbone: 41.4 per cent of workers en-gaged in this sector were females. Fifty per cent of female workers were illiterate compared to 25 per cent of male workers. Majority of the fe-male workers were low-skilled compared to males who were low-medium skilled. Moreover, women were concentrated in the most pre-carious job roles: casual wage labour and subsistence farming.

In the category of agricultural, forestry, and fishery labourers, women make up 52 per cent — a telling indicator of gendered vulnerability. In contrast, in the relatively more secure occupation of market gardeners and crop growers, women account for only 33.7 per cent. The data high-lights a structural inequity. Over 63 per cent of women in this sub-sector were engaged as unpaid family workers, compared to just 20.8 per cent of men. Only 0.5 per cent of women were entrepreneurs, and a mere 11.8per cent were own-account workers.

The majority remained invisible contributors, neither recognised nor remunerated adequately. This gender imbalance is not inevitable; it is the outcome of systemic neglect of women in agricultural skilling pro-grammes. Studies such as Sarkar (2020) and Aryal et al (2021) show that the probability of farm machinery ownership — and by extension, agency in decision-making — rises sharply with education and training. Skilling women, therefore, is not just a matter of equity but of economic efficiency.

Geographical clusters: Based on four parameters — institutional, business infrastructure, human resources and government support (Sutawi et al 2022), the top three geographical clusters in this sub-sector were Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. The PLFS (2022-23) showed that 75 per cent of workers in this sub-sector were concentrated in just nine States — Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh.

Stakeholders survey: The challenge in this part was given the agricultural diversity of India, who should we talk to and whether these discussions would be relevant from one part of the country to another. A bot-tom-up strategy was adopted, where within one agro-climatic zone, all stakeholders along the value chain were identified. Discussions were carried out with those stakeholders. These informed us that there were both supply-side and demand-side challenges. Three key findings from stakeholders’ survey about job roles were:

(a) Farmers and extension service providers need continuous re-skilling and upskilling along with basic, digital and financial literacy, upgrading of knowledge in agriculture and entrepreneurship skills.

(b) District-specific identification of new and emerging job roles fo-cussing in the ‘sunrise’ aspects of the sector and developing requisite training programmes for it. For example, groundwater detection technologists in water-starved districts of Haryana.

(c) Identification of job roles which are difficult to fill. Top three job roles that were facing demand shortage were drone operator, agriculture advisor/crop advisor in agri-tech, IT-GIS specialist (agri-tech) and farm machinery service technician.

India’s agriculture stands at a crossroads. On one side lies the prospect of stagnation — where millions remain locked into low productivity, hereditary occupations, and gendered inequities. On the other lies a future of inclusive modernisation, where technology and skills together drive prosperity. Bridging the divide — between men and women, be-tween traditional and modern practices, between unpaid labour and entrepreneurship— must be the central focus of agricultural reform. Only then can the sector not only feed the nation but also empower those who make it possible.

Joshi and Sahu are Fellows and Bhandari is a Professor at NCAER. Views are personal.

The most immediate and striking observation is the prevalence of the tertiary sector, which consumes the largest share of time for the overall population’s paid work, but it is overwhelmingly dominated by urban population.