Before her husband died, leaving her to care for their two-year-old daughter alone, Sarika Pawar had never imagined having a regular job. Like her mother and most women she knew in rural India, she spent her days confined to her village. Her hours were spent caring for her young daughter, boiling water for drinking and preparing dinner.
But with her husband gone, and her salary as a waitress lost, she was forced to earn money. She took a job at a nearby factory run by a company called All Time Plastics in Silvassa, a town about 100 miles north of Mumbai. Twelve years later, she is still there, pulling newly molded food storage containers and other household items off a conveyor belt, labeling them and placing them in cardboard boxes destined for kitchens as far away as Los Angeles and London.
Pawar earns about 12,000 rupees a month, or about $150, a meager sum by global standards. But those wages have allowed him to keep his daughter in secondary school while transforming their daily lives.
He bought a refrigerator. Suddenly, he could buy vegetables in larger quantities, which limited his trips to the market and gave him more power to haggle and get better prices. He added a propane-fueled stove: freedom from the wood fire that filled his house with smoke and an escape from the tedious work of searching the ground for branches to light a fire.
Above all, Ms. Pawar, 36, described horizons that had broadened.
“When you leave home, you see the outside world,” she said. “You see the possibilities and I feel like we can move forward.”
As international brands limit their dependence on China by shifting some of their production to India, the trend has the potential to generate a significant number of manufacturing jobs, especially for women, who have largely been excluded from the ranks of formal employment in India.
“There is a huge reserve army of female labour in India who would work if given a chance,” said Sonalde Desai, a demographer at the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi. “Whenever there are vacancies for women, they take them.”
In many Asian economies over the past half-century, the rise of manufacturing has been a powerful force for upward mobility. Incomes rose, poverty declined and job opportunities opened up. Women have been at the heart of this transformation.
In Vietnam, where the manufacturing boom has been especially dramatic, more than 68 percent of women and girls over the age of 15 work for some form of pay, according to data compiled by the World Bank. In China, the rate is 63 percent; in Thailand, 59 percent; and in Indonesia, 53 percent. Yet in India, fewer than 33 percent of women are paid in jobs counted in official surveys.
The vital work of women in India is evident from their homes, where they do most of the housework and childcare, to the agricultural fields, where they tend crops and raise animals.
“You raise chickens and you raise children, and it all goes hand in hand,” Desai said. “People find work, but it’s not a very high-paying job.”
In India, women are largely absent from companies that offer regular paid jobs, protected by government regulations that offer protections over wages and working conditions. Their absence partly reflects social factors, from gender discrimination to fears of sexual harassment.
One of India’s largest foreign investments, a factory operated by Foxconn that makes iPhones, has avoided hiring married women because of their household responsibilities, according to a Reuters investigation published last week. Indian agencies said they would investigate the reports.
But more than anything, the dearth of women in the Indian workforce is a testament to the dearth of opportunity. For decades, India’s economic growth has not translated into jobs. The positions that do exist tend to be monopolized by men. With key exceptions like the tech sector, jobs open to women are often so poorly paid that it’s not worth challenging the social norms that typically confine women to the home.
Economists say that if there were more jobs available, more women would face social constraints in their quest to advance economically, especially given that India has significantly increased investments in education for girls in recent decades.
“The supply of young women who want to work is very high,” said Rohini Pande, an expert on Indian employment and director of the Center for Economic Growth at Yale University. “In every survey we see, women want to work, but they find it very difficult to migrate to where there are jobs, and the jobs don’t come to them.”
The consequences of this reality are harsh: the perpetuation of poverty amidst a lost opportunity for improvement.
In a pattern repeated in many industrializing societies, as more women find work, families are urged to invest more in girls’ education. Household purchasing power also increases, fuelling economic expansion that prompts investors to build more factories, thereby creating more jobs – a vicious cycle of wealth creation.
This is the dynamic that India missed by not participating in the manufacturing expansion that has boosted the fortunes of many Asian economies.
And this is the prospect that can suddenly be imagined as geopolitical forces such as trade animosities between the US and China create a new impetus for the landing of factory work in India.
In the industrial enclave of Manesar, about 56 kilometres south of Delhi, Poorvi, who goes by one name, spends her days at a factory that produces toys — kits that children assemble into items like pinball machines — at a fast-growing startup, Smartivity. She inspects the finished products for defects and earns about Rs 12,000 a month.
As a child, her mother stayed at home. Poorvi, who recently got married, sees her factory job as a pragmatic way of coping with the rising cost of living in a rapidly growing urban area.
“Nowadays, one income is not enough to support a family,” Poorvi said. “That’s why women are going out to work. It’s a step forward, but it’s also a necessity. Women are doing a lot of things. Why can’t I?”
Her bosses, two men who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, something like the country’s version of MIT, are willing to hire women.
“There are aspects of work that women do better,” said Pulkit Singh, the company’s chief of staff. “Women can concentrate for longer hours than men. They don’t need as many smoke breaks, or breaks in general. Women are definitely more hardworking and productive than men.”
About 40 percent of the nearly 200 jobs at Smartivity’s factory are currently held by women, and that percentage may increase as the business grows.
Ashwini Kumar, chief executive of Smartivity, said the company was in talks with Walmart to sell its products on store shelves in the United States, a development that could more than double the number of jobs.
“They want to diversify,” said Kumar, 35. “They want to move their supply chain to India.”
At All Time Plastics, the company near Mumbai where Pawar works, 70 percent of the factory’s roughly 600 workers are women. The percentage rose dramatically last year, after the local government changed the law to allow women to work the night shift. The factory has buses that pick up and drop off women at their homes to alleviate safety concerns.
Among the women working at the factory on a recent morning was Smita Vijay Patel, 35. A mother of two, she stopped going to school after the eighth grade because her parents couldn’t afford to pay for tuition and books. Her own daughter, 15, is still in school and plans to go on to college — a prospect made possible by the salary Ms. Patel receives at the factory. Her son, 19, is already in college.
Ms. Patel now effectively works two jobs: She is a quality control inspector at the plant, cooks for her family and keeps house, getting up at 5 a.m. to make it to her 7 a.m. shift.
“It’s difficult, but it’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t get an education, so I think my children should get an education so they can progress further.”
Hari Kumar Contributed reporting.
