More women work in villages than in cities

Women workers filler candy in wrapper at a processing plant in a Punjab village. (TOI file photo by Pritam Thakur)

NEW DELHI: With all the buzz around double-income power couples, it is easy to believe that more and more urban families have given up the sole breadwinner model of the past. But that would be a mistake, as just released Census 2011 data shows.An overwhelming 51 per cent of urban households live on the income of a single earner, while double-income families are a distant 26 per cent. In rural areas, the situation is quite different. While 34 per cent of families have a single worker, double-worker families are slightly more at 35 per cent.In fact, the double-income-no-kids (DINK) lifestyle celebrated as a cosmopolitan aspiration is prevalent in nearly 42 per cent of two-member rural families compared to just 22 per cent of similar urban families.If you combine the rural and urban figures, here is what emerges for the India picture: 39 per cent of households sustain themselves on the income of a single working member while 33 per cent depend on two workers. This is not too different from a decade ago, when Census 2001 had revealed that 38 per cent of households had a single breadwinner while 32 per cent had two working members.Perhaps this is because rural families are bigger and so more members are able to work? Not true. In urban areas, nearly three quarters of families have 3-6 members. In rural areas, 66 per cent are in this range. Clearly, this size is the most predominant one in both rural and urban areas. About 17 per cent of families in rural areas have 7-10 members compared to nearly 13 per cent in urban areas.Two inter-related factors drive rural families towards multiple persons going out to work. The primary reason is economic necessity. Average rural income is estimated at a meager Rs 6,307 per month for a typical household by the most recent consumer expenditure survey in 2011-12 done by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO). In inflation-adjusted terms, rural incomes have increased by a paltry 2 per cent per year.So families need to supplement their incomes. In urban areas, average household income is Rs 11,394 for a typical sized household, and it has increased by a slightly better 3 per cent annually.But the second factor is what tilts the balance for multiple worker families in rural areas: women workers. Census 2011 data had earlier shown that the share of working women in rural areas was 35 per cent compared to just 21 per cent in urban areas. This is despite the drastic drop in women’s employment in the past few years. For a variety of cultural, economic and security reasons, most women in urban families are not gainfully employed outside their homes, causing dependence on a single income.In rural areas, efforts by families to supplement their incomes do not meet with much success because about a third of multiple workers are getting jobs for only up to 6 months. In urban areas, the proportion of such marginal workers is much lower at 12 per cent to 20 per cent. Marginal workers usually get irregular work for very low wages.