KOVALAM: India ranks 141st out of 142 nations and 2062 districts in the world that are categorized as gender critical when it comes to health and survival of women as compared to men. As a whole the country ranks 127th on gender inequality index and 114th on gender gap in the world.

Pam Rajput, chairperson of the high-level committee on status of women, formed by the central government revealed that India needs 200 million more women to join the formal workforce to improve the GDP as targeted in 2025. As per McKinsey’s report in 2013—The Power of Parity: How advancing women’s equality can add $12 trillion to global growth of which Indian alone can contribute to $700 billion and upping the country’s GDP by 1.4 points.

On Thursday, the report of the committee with shocking revelations was discussed at length during the International Conference on Gender Equality 2015, organized by UN Women and Kerala government. This event was of prime importance for Kerala as it released the first ever policies for transgender community in the state.

The report claims that only 30.3% of women are in the workforce in India as per the World Bank WDI report among the eight South East Asian countries and ranks 134th in the world when it comes to economic participation of women. Nepal has the highest with 83.1% women formally employed.

“India is at its worst on gender inequality. We have only three percent of women vice-chancellors of the 600-odd universities. So how is education really empowering women? We need women to be educated and skilled especially of higher order skill sets. Women are far behind in the choice of subjects itself. According to some economists, only 15% of women are really paid (employed in formal sector). We need 200 million more women to join the formal workforce to up the GDP by 27% in the coming years,” she said during an exclusive interview with TOI.

Rajput says that this is after 40 years that the country is looking at a comprehensive report on status of women after 1974 and has sent recommendations to the Centre to frame a national action plan that would commit to zero tolerance towards violence against women.

The committee report shows that there is a gap of 25% of women participation in workforce across the country, 15.5% in urban areas and 30% in rural areas. Gender economists calls this phenomena, disempowerment of women. The report finds declining sex ratio to be the most worrying issues giving rise to gender inequality. The decline has been shocking—in 1987-88, the sex ratio was 32.2% where as it fell to 24% in 2014.

The high level committee has recommended strong laws to prevent violence against women than just to report and act on crime on women, 50% seat share for women in national, state and local governments, minimum social security package for women across regions and economic strata, facilitate women to join workforce in the manufacturing sector as the Make In India mission aims. Pam Rajput also points out that smart cities concept should have built-in instruments on gender equality and safe cities.

