30 The Economist February 20th 2021
Asia
India’s labour market200m jobs short
B
efore covid-19, Ashwini Pavde’s small
family was doing fine. She worked as a
cook for as many as six households. Her
husband was the driver for a company
boss. A combined monthly income of $300
tidily covered fees at a local “English-me-
dium” school for their 14-year-old son, as
well as the $75 rent on their single-room
cement house in Gandhi Nagar, a dense
slum wedged between bristling tower
blocks in the outer suburbs of Mumbai.
The pandemic has been tough, though.
Ms Pavde’s husband lost his job when his
employer started working from home last
March. He has found the odd job as a taxi
driver. Mostly he has been idle. During
weeks of heavily enforced lockdown, just
two of Ms Pavde’s clients kept paying her,
and only half her normal wage.
Similarly stricken neighbours have fled
to their villages of origin, but the Pavdes
have no land to go back to. So they have
stuck it out, although with Ms Pavde’s
earnings reduced to barely $50 a month,
they rely heavily on subsidised rice and
lentils. To pay school fees she has bor-rowed $680 through a savings pool that she
joined with women friends. But when will
she find work enough to repay the loan?
“People tell me we’ll call you if we need
you; we’re working from home and can
manage,” Ms Pavde says. She reckons it will
take two years for her family to get back to
where they were a year ago.
In terms of health, India appears to
have escaped relatively lightly from co-
vid-19, with a toll of reported deaths per
million people that is less than a tenth of
those in America or Britain. In terms of
jobs, Indians have suffered worse. Like the
Pavdes, millions have lost work, or been
forced to accept less money and harsher
conditions. With only the thinnest cush-ion of government support, it is the poor
who are hit hardest. A household survey in
Mumbai in January found that 9% of those
in the top socioeconomic quintile had lost
their jobs. Their average daily income had
dropped from $22.30 to $17.40. Among
those on the bottom rung, 47% had lost
their jobs. Daily income had fallen by near-
ly half, from $6 a day to just $3.35.
Women have been squeezed especially
hard. The same survey in Mumbai found
that while three-quarters of men said their
jobs had been adversely affected by the cri-
sis, the proportion among women was
89%. And whereas most men have now ei-
ther returned to old jobs or found new
ones, joblessness among women appears
to have lingered. The Centre for Monitor-
ing the Indian Economy (cmie), a private
research firm that closely tracks employ-
ment, reckons that back in 2019 some 9.7%
of adult women in Indian cities considered
themselves part of the labour force. That
number dropped to 7.4% during the lock-
down last spring, but disturbingly seems
to have sunk still lower by November, to
just 6.9%. cmie’s surveys, which cover
170,000 households across India, found
that men who lost their job during the
lockdown were eight times more likely to
find another within a few months than
women who had lost theirs.
There are simple reasons why covid-19
has been a particular shock to female em-
ployment. One is that more women have
lower-paying, precarious jobs to start with,MUMBAI
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