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Training, targeted support can make a difference.

India’s livestock sector is experiencing a transformation, and women are at its core. The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) and NCAER (2025) study titled, ‘National Skill Gap Study for High Growth Sectors’, assessed the skill shortages and gaps in the sector, ‘raising cattle and buffaloes’.

The MSDE-NCAER study used the Periodic Labour Force Survey (2022-23) data to show that the employment in the livestock sector increased at a compound annual growth rate of 20.8 per cent between 2017-18 and 2022-23. This sector employed 5 per cent of the country’s workforce. And 82 per cent of the workers engaged in ‘raising cattle and buffaloes’ were women.

Despite their dominance in this sector, more than 80 per cent of the female workers were ‘animal workers’ and were employed either as self-employed workers (79 per cent) or unpaid family workers (20.7 per cent). Only 0.13 per cent of the women workers were Business Services and Administration Managers and 0.01 per cent of the female workers were Managing Directors and Chief Executives.

Low-paid labour

Essentially, women are mostly engaged in low-paid, labour-intensive jobs such as feeding, milking, and cleaning. The MSDE-NCAER study also found minimal female representation in skilled or managerial roles. Majority of the female workers in this sector were low-skilled (51 per cent) characterised by illiteracy or literacy below primary education.

As per MSDE-NCAER (2025) computations from the PLFS, 79.2 per cent of female workers in this sector were concentrated in eight States in 2022–23: Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Maharashtra. Uttar Pradesh alone accounted for nearly a third of female workers in raising cattle and buffaloes. However, women’s participation and the nature of their roles vary significantly across States. Women in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana are heavily involved in cattle care but are seldom part of cooperatives. Karnataka and West Bengal witness women’s participation mostly in household-based dairy activities with limited commercial engagement.

Essentially, the problem in this sector is two-fold. First, female workers in the sector are stuck in a low-equilibrium trap. Milk production is also characterised by low productivity. Second, the MSDE-NCAER (2025) study shows that there are skill shortages in formal job roles like veterinary technician/assistant, mechanic-refrigeration and air conditioning, dairy technologists, and managers of dairy farms.

For the first problem, the Gujarat model shows a way out, where women run dairies supported by financial assistance and leadership training have elevated their incomes and roles within the value chain (NDDB Annual Reports). Women-led cooperatives and self-help groups (SHGs) offer promising models that can be replicated across States. However, several structural barriers remain. Limited access to land, financial credit, and market linkages prevent women from scaling up dairy operations. The following measures can address the dual nature of the skilling problems:

Recognition of prior learning, re-skilling and upskilling of women milker/animal workers/dairy farmers: Literacy programmes can be combined with vocational skilling programmes like Jan Shikshan Sansthan (JSS) programmes in specific blocks;

Mobile training units — delivering on-the-ground technical and business skills in rural areas;

Women-only training centres — equipping women with practical knowledge in AI techniques, fodder conservation, and dairy technology;

Impart knowledge of animal husbandry

Financial inclusion schemes — providing microcredit, subsidies, and insurance for women entrepreneurs (NABARD 2018).

Gender-sensitive dairy policies — ensuring equal cooperative membership, land rights, and leadership representation (FAO 2009).

Provide entrepreneurship skills for workers likely to be engaged in self employment

Scholarships for women in dairy science: Incentivising higher education for women in veterinary and dairy-related disciplines (U-DISE+ 2022-23).

Scholarships for women in dairy management The future of India’s dairy sector depends on how well we empower women — through education, training, and targeted support.

Bandyopadhyay is a Senior Fellow, Sahu is a Fellow, and Bhandari is a Professor, at NCAER. Views are personal

From IT corridors to gig platforms, urban job markets remain stratified by caste, religion and gender. It’s time to make inclusion a core goal of labour policy.

In India’s largest cities, a Muslim woman with a university degree is still more likely to be shut out of a white-collar job than her equally qualified peers from other faiths, men or women. This is not what B.R. Ambedkar envisioned when he called cities “emancipatory zones” where caste hierarchies would dissolve. In fact, labour force data from six major cities tell a different story: segregation in employment by caste and religion remains as entrenched as ever, and in some ways sharper than the divide between men and women.

This is not only a question of social justice; it is a structural brake on productivity – one that urban labour policy must release to realise the full potential of India’s cities.

When Identity Outweighs Gender

Globally, gender is often the most significant dividing line in the workplace. In Paris or Toronto, women are more likely to be clustered in certain jobs than any ethnic or religious group. In Mumbai or Chennai, it is your last name, community or faith that decides which doors open.

Labour force data from Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bengaluru reveal strikingly high segregation scores for several marginalised groups. On the Gini index – where zero means perfect integration and one means complete separation – the score is 0.51 for Dalits and 0.49 for Muslims, compared with just 0.20 for gender segregation overall.

The disadvantage is sharpest at the intersections, where gender overlaps with caste, religion, or minority status. Women from marginalised communities – for example, Dalit and Muslim women – face both, a narrower range of jobs and systematic exclusion from higher-status roles. They are also less likely to be in the workforce at all, creating a “double bind” of low participation and high segregation. Even within these communities, smaller sub-groups are further channelled into different kinds of jobs, adding yet another layer to the pattern of exclusion.

Often seen as more integrated, Christians, Sikhs, and smaller minority groups also record higher segregation levels – reminding us that workplace exclusion is not confined to the largest marginalised communities.

The Machinery of Exclusion

Why do these gaps persist in cities that are growing richer and more diverse? The answer lies in the way urban labour markets are structured. For many marginalised groups, it is informal and precarious work that dominates, offering little scope for upward mobility.

Hiring often depends on personal networks, neighbourhood ties or alumni groups, favouring those already connected to advantaged circles. This “social capital” acts as an invisible gate, shutting others out. Discrimination has also evolved: credential inflation, language preferences, and notions of “cultural fit” serve as polite filters, achieving the same result as overt bias.

Migration patterns reinforce the divide. Newcomers without urban networks or sector-specific skills are often funnelled into insecure work, locking them into low-mobility tracks. When these structures meet gender bias, the disadvantages multiply.

Ultimately, the exclusion is as much about information as opportunity. It is the difference between hearing about a bank’s front-desk opening through a well-placed contact and never knowing the vacancy existed at all.

The New Economy isn’t a Level Field

India’s technology and service sectors have changed the face of urban employment, opening doors for some from historically excluded groups, particularly English-speaking, first-generation graduates. For a subset of Dalit and Muslim youth, these roles represent opportunities their parents never had.

But entry does not guarantee mobility. Many such jobs, especially in the gig economy, replicate the insecurity of the informal sector: no benefits, no career ladder, and few protections. Without targeted support for advancement and stability, these new sectors risk becoming waiting rooms rather than springboards, simply repackaging an old pattern of limited opportunity.

Old barriers are adapting to new sectors – making policy intervention urgent.

Turning Evidence into Change

Segregation persists even after accounting for education, occupation, and city effects, making it clear that growth alone will not dissolve the exclusion problem. The solution lies in dismantling the structures that keep it in place. Reducing informality, expanding social protections and enforcing labour standards would create more secure jobs for those now clustered in precarious work.

Training programmes should connect directly to vacancies, backed by mentorship, internships, and soft-skill support for first-generation professionals. Public narratives that spotlight diverse success stories can help shift perceptions, while disaggregated city-level data can reveal where barriers are falling and where they are not.

Segregation by caste, religion, and gender is not only a matter of fairness; it constrains economic potential. When talent is shut out of higher-productivity work, the entire economy operates below capacity. The true measure of India’s urban success will not be the height of its skylines, but the breadth of its opportunities – and how far they reach.

Jyoti Thakur is an Associate Fellow at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, Delhi (NCAER). Karthick V is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangaluru (ISEC).

The discussion in this article is based on the authors’ working paper on the subject, accessible at NCAER website. Views are personal.

To the GST Council’s credit, it went beyond the elimination of two rate slabs and delved into fine details to fix structural anomalies in this tax regimes. It broad-bases rates for like goods, corrects inverted duties and clusters products by their end use.

The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council has finally spoken its mind about the GST 2.0 package of reforms mooted by the Centre and earlier adopted by the Group of Ministers (GoM) tasked with the work of rate rationalization.

Going by reports, the discussions were full-throated and the endorsement unanimous. The council deserves plaudits for not dithering in blessing such a comprehensive reform agenda with far-reaching effects, despite concerns about a likely ‘loss’ of revenue. Looked at closely, the agenda reflects the work of not one, but three GoMs, the other two being on the compensation cess and on life as well as health insurance.

This decision has been hailed by stakeholders and commentators with equal enthusiasm for good reason. At the outset, the relief offered by way of rate cuts is deeper and much more extensive than expected. The exercise has not been confined to the mere abolition of two rate slabs—12% and 28%—and the re-slotting of those goods and services in the 5% or 18% slabs. Goods and services have also been shifted from the 18% slab to 5% where necessary.

In the realm of indirect taxes, changing the categorization of individual goods or services from one rate slab to another is usually frowned upon as arbitrary. This is far from it. What has been attempted in this instance has three very clear policy underpinnings.

The most important one is the revision’s broad-banding of rates on substitute or similar goods, or goods of the same class, so that classification disputes are minimized. A case in point is food products, where several such disputes had arisen in the past owing to rate arbitrage. Now, all processed foods (barring aerated waters), including an omnibus category of foods not specified elsewhere, are clubbed at a common rate of 5%, setting at rest the scope for any future controversy.

The second imperative that has driven this rejig is the removal of inverted tax rates. By moving specified goods from the 18% to 5% slab, long-standing inversions have been fixed for man-made textiles, tractors and fertilizers, apart from leather footwear and other products. Unless we transition to a single rate structure, some rate inversions are inevitable.

The package proposes a revamp of the refund process, so that 90% of the refund of accumulated input tax credit (ITC) due (on account of rate inversions) may be refunded in an automated and time-bound manner, subject to risk-assessment. This would unlock working capital and improve the competitiveness of industry.

The third consideration that has informed such shifts is the clustering of products by their end- use to provide tax relief to certain sectors or items of mass consumption. Examples of these are tractors, agricultural machinery, fertilizers and bio-fertilizers, educational materials, personal care and personal healthcare products, ready-made garments and footwear (up to a certain value threshold) and renewables, including electric vehicles. Similar is the case with the review of items being charged 28%.

Goods that can be categorized as ‘aspirational’—like small cars, air conditioners, dishwashers and large TVs—have all been clubbed at a common rate of 18%. Barring full exemption for a few goods, the rate cuts are deep, with burdens going down in a range from 36% to 72%. Thus, the relief for consumers is substantial and very likely to stimulate both aggregate demand and growth in the short to medium term. That is why Prime Minister Narendra Modi described it as a Diwali bonanza and its capacity to boost consumption has become its unique selling point.

This meticulous attention to detail in calibrating GST rates with clear objectives and a broad purpose is perhaps unprecedented. The spin-off is that the resultant structure automatically acquires durability and would not need to be tinkered with for a while.

Among the three pillars of the Prime Minister’s package, the structural pillar referred to the need to impart stability. This has been achieved. As such, a second-order effect of these changes would be the boost they provide private investments, which are motivated to a large extent by certainty and stability.

It is heartening that the list of “demerit goods” or “sin goods” has been confined to tobacco and tobacco products, aerated beverages (given their high sugar content and attendant health risks) and some categories of automobiles (that have the ability to bear a higher incidence of tax). The council has also abjured the temptation of retaining the tax burden on these products at the current level (inclusive of cess) and confined them to the statutorily prescribed 40% rate. Since the rates are ad valorem, evasion-prone tobacco and tobacco products will attract tax on their retail sale price instead of today’s compounded levy. This is a neat and foolproof approach that takes minimal regulatory oversight.

With these changes and process reforms for registration, refunds and return filing, a major portion of our reform objectives has been accomplished. Some legislation-related issues, such as those related to ‘intermediary services,’ have also been resolved. The council’s attention should shift next to other legislative ambiguities, cleaning up the plumbing for ITC flows, introducing joint or coordinated audits and investing in the training of officers for dispute settlement—best done in mission mode.

The author is former chairman, Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs, and senior advisor, KPMG and NCAER. These are the author’s personal views.

The political economy of fiscal and financial blind spots.

Financial surveillance fails when it matters most. Every major financial disruption – from the 1997 Asian crisis to the 2008 financial crisis or recent geopolitical shocks from wars, sanctions and trade realignments – has exposed how blind spots persist in national systems, regional arrangements and global oversight.

Macrofinancial surveillance – specifically monitoring the interconnections between the financial system and the broader macroeconomy (fiscal, monetary, real economy linkages) – consistently breaks down despite massive institutional investment. Most economies operate for years without systematic macrofinancial evaluation, particularly when risks are accelerating. Crucially, no country has developed a comprehensive system to monitor fiscal-financial-real economy interactions systematically – existing frameworks focus on financial stability within the financial sector, rather than on cross-sectoral linkages.

The mismatch is stark. The International Monetary Fund conducts comprehensive assessments every five to 10 years for systemically important countries, over a decade for others. Financial Stability Board peer reviews are narrower, targeting standards compliance rather than system-wide dynamics. Basel Committee assessments follow separate timelines entirely. The IMF’s 2021 review found these cycles poorly coordinated.

The problem is not technical incapacity but political economy. Fiscal fragility, bureaucratic incentives, sovereignty concerns and collective action failures make fragmentation rational, even when it is systemically disastrous.

The fiscal surveillance trap

Surveillance matters most when private losses are reflected on public balance sheets. Ireland’s 2008 blanket banking guarantee transformed manageable sectoral problems into an €85bn sovereign crisis because the government underestimated the scale of banking sector losses and their fiscal implications.

This is the ‘fiscal surveillance trap’. Governments need comprehensive assessments to manage contingent liabilities but publishing them can trigger market reactions that crystallise those existing liabilities. Türkiye’s 2018 IMF consultation showed how detailed warnings about external financing risks preceded an acceleration in portfolio outflows.

The trap hits developing economies hardest. Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development data show that advanced economies maintain fiscal buffers averaging 15-20% of gross domestic product, while developing economies average just 3-5%. When confidence falters, richer countries absorb volatility while poorer ones slide into debt crises. This fiscal arithmetic deepens political obstacles, making fragmentation the equilibrium response.

Why surveillance fragments domestically

Three forces sustain this equilibrium. First, bureaucratic empire-building leads agencies to resist coordination that threatens autonomy. Second, regulatory capture allows financial institutions to prefer narrow regimes they can influence over system-wide transparency. Third, political myopia encourages governments to avoid disclosures that may destabilise markets during electoral cycles.

Deeper architectural problems compound these coordination failures. Existing regulatory frameworks assume clear boundaries between sectors – banking regulation for banks, fiscal policy for governments, monetary policy for central banks. Yet modern economies feature deep interconnections that cross these institutional boundaries, while surveillance remains siloed. Central bank independence, once designed to insulate monetary policy, now creates coordination gaps precisely when systemic risks span multiple mandates.

These forces create what economist Douglass North calls ‘institutional persistence’. Bad arrangements endure because incumbents bear the costs of change, while benefits are diffused. Each institution optimises locally while system-wide risks accumulate unseen.

Figure 1. How institutions fragment surveillance

Analysis from institutional incentive literature and surveillance practice observations

Central banks adapt by embracing deliberate ambiguity. Reports use phrases like ‘elevated vulnerabilities’ to convey risks without naming institutions. While rational, this undermines effectiveness as vague warnings rarely spur policy change. Surveillance becomes ‘performative’ – outwardly demonstrating diligence while avoiding impact. The more surveillance is needed, the less transparency is possible.

The global collective action failure

The same logic plays out internationally. Everyone benefits from robust surveillance, but each country has incentives to conceal vulnerabilities while enjoying others’ transparency – creating asymmetry.

When the Federal Reserve publishes stress tests, markets view it as prudential strength because the US can absorb shocks. When Nigeria’s central bank disclosed vulnerabilities in 2019, the result was capital flight and currency depreciation. Advanced economies internalise disclosure costs while developing economies face net costs.

Where blind spots matter most

The consequences are starkest where macrofinancially significant innovations outpace regulatory frameworks. India’s United Payments Interface processed ₹139tn in 2023 – transactions that affect monetary velocity but fall outside traditional banking supervision. Brazil’s digital real pilot blurs fiscal and monetary boundaries in ways current frameworks cannot address.

Climate shocks exacerbate the problem by simultaneously affecting all three macrofinancial dimensions. Pakistan’s 2022 floods drove banking defaults, infrastructure losses and fiscal emergency spending – yet no surveillance framework monitors how environmental shocks propagate across fiscal-financial-real economy linkages.

What does an effective design look like?

Breaking the fiscal surveillance trap requires recognising that some solutions can help countries escape the trap entirely, while others must work within its constraints.

Escaping the trap becomes possible when disclosure costs are reduced or shared. Industry co-financing – making financial institutions contribute to surveillance costs proportional to systemic risks they generate – aligns private incentives with public monitoring needs. Regional compacts like the Asean+3 Macroeconomic Research Office can share surveillance capacity across neighbouring economies, pooling resources while reducing individual country exposure to market reactions.

Working within the trap requires accepting that full transparency may be impossible but systematic monitoring can still occur. The most promising structural reform involves fiscal-financial integration that embeds macrofinancial analysis within existing institutional mandates. The UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility demonstrates how combining fiscal projections with financial stability assessments creates comprehensive monitoring without requiring new disclosure frameworks that might trigger market reactions.

The path forward

No consistent global mechanism exists to judge whether surveillance is effective in practice. The costs of macrofinancial surveillance failure are mounting – the IMF projects global debt exceeding $100tn in 2024, with risks heavily tilted upward such that debt could reach 115% of GDP in adverse scenarios. High macroeconomic uncertainty now threatens to amplify downside risks by 1.2 percentage points of growth, turning modest expansion into contraction when surveillance blind spots intersect with elevated debt vulnerabilities. Without systematic monitoring, debates about the future of finance remain academic.

Economist Friedrich Hayek warned that ‘The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.’ Policy-makers imagine they can design stability by managing pieces in isolation, yet systemic risks emerge from the fiscal-financial whole. The choice is stark: build surveillance that confronts political realities or face breakdowns that will prove far costlier than systematic monitoring.

Udaibir Das is a Visiting Professor at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, Senior Non-Resident Adviser at the Bank of England, Senior Adviser of the International Forum for Sovereign Wealth Funds, and Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation America. Views are personal.

A critical part of the package are the process reforms for simplifying registrations and expediting refunds, both for inverted duty structure and exports.

The run-up to the 56th Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council meeting was full of mixed sentiments—lots of excitement about the broad-brush picture of GST 2.0 reform and yet some lurking apprehension about the likely fine print. There was some relief when the Group of Ministers approved the Centre’s proposal on August 21. Given that some of the states had been expressing concerns about the revenue implications of the proposal and their pitch for seeking compensation, there was nervousness about which way the proposals would go in the GST Council when it met on September 3 and 4. Questions like whether the Council would reverse some of the proposed changes to accommodate these concerns or even defer it till a more acceptable alternative emerges were quite figural.

Belying these apprehensions, the Council has exhibited statesmanship in fully endorsing what was inherently a sound and irresistible proposal promising meaningful simplification in the rate structure and real relief in tax burden to all constituencies that matter for providing either a consumption or growth impetus to the economy. The Council has been sagacious enough both to recognise its merit as well as the need for its immediate adoption—implicitly parking revenue concerns till the proposal has played itself out in the economy. In the press briefing, the revenue secretary also chose not to characterise the revenue implications of the proposal (estimated to be about Rs 48,000 crore by the government) as a “loss” owing to the positive impact the rate cuts would have on consumption and demand, thereby providing adequate buoyancy to collections.

The package has received widespread support and acclaim from stakeholders. It has focused not just on abolition of the 12% and 28% rate slabs and refitting those goods and services into either 5% or 18% (putting in place a two-tier rate structure), but also on removing several inversions in duty by migrating goods from the 18% slab to 5%. A case in point being tractors, textiles, fertilisers, and so on. Of course, the thrust has been on providing relief to a large swathe of mass consumption items such as processed foods, apparel and footwear, personal care and healthcare products, life-saving drugs, educational material, bicycles, and life and health insurance.

As promised, the rate has been lowered on many aspirational goods too, such as small cars, motorcycles, air conditioners, dishwashers, and large televisions. Then, there are sector-specific reductions for agricultural goods and farm equipment, renewable energy products, and defence. Rate changes have been complemented by process reforms for registration, and refunds where technology would be used to eliminate human intervention and ensure time-bound delivery. Together, these make a very wholesome package minimising future disputes owing to misclassification and easing day-to-day existence.

Now, the focus must shift to implementation starting September 22 when the rate changes take effect. There are challenges that businesses face. The first, which is to tweak their ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems to reflect the rate changes, should not pose a problem as they have been given a lead time of more than two weeks. Then, they have to adroitly manage the movement of inventory so that there are adequate stocks available at different stages in the distribution chain to service heightened demand during the upcoming festival season.

At the same time, in a situation of rate reduction, if they are loaded with high inventory before September 22, distributors would accumulate surplus input tax credit (and blocked working capital) without the possibility of liquidation when they resell at lower rates of tax. A fine balancing act would thus be needed. Third, prices of products whose GST rate has undergone a change need to be reset. The key question in everyone’s mind is whether these large-scale benefits would actually be passed on to the consumer or cornered by businesses, thereby thwarting the very purpose for which they are proposed.

Until some time back, it would have been possible to enforce this through anti-profiteering provisions in the GST law (Section 171) and the attendant administrative machinery for investigating complaints of profiteering and adjudicating them. While the substantive provision subsists on the statute book, the administrative machinery for implementation has already been deactivated. The Council has chosen not to revive it and to trust businesses to comply voluntarily. The unresolved issue is whether these provisions would still be enforceable by GST authorities as part of compliance verification and, if so, in what manner. A suitable clarification from the Council would help.

There are implementation issues for the government too. A critical part of the package are the process reforms for simplifying registrations and expediting refunds (both for inverted duty structure and exports). The industry awaits this with lot of anticipation. The legal framework, information technology infrastructure, business processes, and standard operating procedures for these would have been designed already. The challenge for the government would be to ensure that the system of risk-based selection is robust and dynamic so that the selection is well-targeted. Trade’s experience with identification of risky exporters in the past and the weeding out of false positives was not a happy one. The new system should be responsive and nimble in reviewing its selection lest history repeat itself.

Vivek Johri, Former chairman, Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs, and senior adviser, KPMG and National Council of Applied Economic Research. Views are personal.