Vision 2047 needs India’s women to be in work – so why aren’t they?

India ranks low globally for women’s labour force participation – a considerable constraint on its development ambitions. Tackling the shortfall requires better state-provided childcare and jobs that women can keep through marriage and motherhood to lower the churn that pushes them out of paid work.

India has set itself the goal of becoming a developed, high-income country by 2047, the centenary year of its independence. That goal – known as Vision 2047 – rests in part on a growing and productive workforce.

But for one half of that workforce, the trend is running in the wrong direction. India is now the world’s sixth largest economy and its women are significantly more educated than ever. Yet fewer Indian women are in the labour force than a generation ago. Among the world’s top 20 economies, India’s rate of labour force participation by women is the lowest (see Figure 1 for rankings of what economists call FLFPR).

Figure 1: Female labour force participation rates (FLFPR) across the world’s 20 largest economies, 2025

Source: ILOSTAT.
Notes: FLFPR (percentage of the population of women and girls aged 15 and over, estimated by the International Labour Organization, ILO).

India’s rate of women’s labour force participation fell from 34% in 2000 to 26% in 2020, then rose to 32% in 2025. Across every year with available data since 2001, India’s labour force participation rate among men has been at least twice and, at times, over three and a half times that of women (see Figure 2). One estimate suggests that removing barriers to women’s labour force participation in India would raise overall living standards by 35% and marketable output (GDP) by 12% (Ostry et al, 2018).

Figure 2: India’s labour force participation rates (%) by gender for population aged 15 and above, 2001-25

Source: ILOSTAT
Note: Several analyses have pointed out that the post-2020 rebound in India’s FLFPR is an outcome of rising participation in rural areas, concentrated in own-account and unpaid categories of self-employment in agriculture and the unorganised sector.

A puzzle that shouldn’t exist

Standard development economics predicts a U-shaped relationship between economic growth and women’s labour force participation. The rate of participation dips as household incomes first rise, then climbs again as education, services-sector jobs and social norms catch up (Goldin, 1994). India has done the first half of that curve, but has been slow to complete the second.

The decline in women’s labour force participation is driven jointly by supply-side change – rising school enrolment among girls and declining child labour – and demand-side change, most notably the mechanisation of agriculture and a fall in international demand for labour-intensive manufacturing (Mehrotra and Parida, 2017). Both trends have a large effect on India’s working-age women.

Choice or constraint?

India’s declining rate of women’s labour force participation has often been read in the media and by some researchers as women opting out of work in favour of care. But other experts argue that the causality runs the other way. Women’s primary responsibility for unpaid care work shapes whether, how and on what terms they can participate in the market economy at all – so the choice was never open to begin with (Kabeer, 2025).

Among Indian women outside the labour force, nearly half (45%) cite ‘childcare and homemaking commitments’ as their primary reason for not working – well ahead of ‘wanting to continue studies’ (34%) or health reasons (9%). This statistic looks like evidence of preference (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Reasons reported by women and girls aged 15 and above for not being in the labour force

Source: Employment Statistics in Focus, April 2023, Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India.
Note: Percentage of women outside the labour force, 2021-22.

An analysis based on longitudinal data finds that it is better explained by an absence of steady, gainful work that women could take up (Deshpande and Singh, 2021). Three mechanisms drive that gap: time; jobs; and childcare.

Mechanism one: the time-use gap

Indian women spend an average of 283 minutes a day on unpaid domestic and care-giving work, compared with 37 minutes for men. That is a gap of more than four hours every day. On the paid-work side, the ratio flips almost exactly. Men spend 287 minutes a day on employment-related activities and women just 71 (see Figure 4).

This is framed as ‘time poverty’ – a situation in which the time required for unpaid obligations leaves too little left over for job search, skills training, commuting or the sustained hours that most paid work demands. Among women bearing care responsibilities, around 60% report no other household member available to take on those duties (Ghai, 2018).

Figure 4: Average time spent per day per person, by gender, aged 6 and above

Source: Time Use Survey 2024, Government of India.

Among a set of the world’s largest economies, women in India show the widest gap between paid and unpaid work of the group (see Figure 5). Italy, Mexico and Türkiye show a broadly similar pattern of low paid hours and high unpaid hours – but none are as extreme as India. Women in Canada, China, Japan, South Korea and the United States report more paid work time than unpaid work.

Figure 5: Differences in time spent in paid versus unpaid work by women in selected large economies

Source: OECD Time Use Database.

Even so, the causal effect of care burden on labour force participation is contested in the most rigorous recent Indian evidence, which offers a demand-side account instead (Deshpande and Singh, 2021). This idea informs analysis of the second mechanism.

Mechanism two: a demand-side problem hiding behind a supply-side statistic

If time poverty explains the whole decline in women’s labour force market participation, freeing up their time should be enough to boost their share in work. But an analysis based on four years (2016-19) of household panel data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) on more than 350,000 working-age women findsthat most of the decline is not permanent exit but constant churn (Deshpande and Singh, 2021).

Indian women move in and out of the labour force repeatedly over short periods, rather than withdrawing once and for all (see Figure 6). Between 2016 and 2019, the average rate of women’s labour force participation was 14-15% at any given point in time, but 44% of women were in the labour force at least once during that period – more than three times the point-in-time estimate. Only about 2% of women stayed continuously in the labour force between 2016 and 2019. Women were roughly sixtimes more likely than men to exit the labour force in any given survey round and about four times less likely to re-enter once out.

Figure 6: Point-in-time average and participation ‘at least once in four years’, by gender

Source: Deshpande and Singh, 2021
Note: ‘Point-in-time average’ is women’s/men’s mean labour force participation rate across 12 survey rounds (January 2016–December 2019). ‘At least once in four years’ is the share of individuals who were in the labour force in at least one of those rounds. The large gap for women (and the much smaller gap for men) indicates frequent short-term entry and exit from the labour force rather than a stable state of either working or not working.

This pattern is hard to square with fixed social norms or a settled preference for care work. Norms and preferences don’t oscillate every few months. It fits far more naturally with women taking work when it becomes available and losing it again shortly after.

Displacement adds a second piece of evidence. Between 2016 and 2019, total employment of men rose by about 12 million while total employment of women fell by about nine million. This near mirror-image pattern shows up across a broad range of industry categories, including sectors like education where women have traditionally been well represented.

The burden of unpaid care factor is still critical, but the constraint bites differently. The labour market rations the kind of work compatible with care responsibilities so severely that most women who want it cannot get enough of it to remain continuously employed.

This lines up with the International Labour Organization (ILO) finding that around a third of rural and a quarter of urban women with care duties report that they would take up work if it were available at or near home (Chaudhary and Verick, 2014). Similarly, another analysis attributes 62% of the decline in women’s labour force participation between 1994 and 2010 to shrinking demand-side opportunities rather than supply-side change (Kapsos et al, 2014).

Mechanism three: the vanishing crèche

The third channel is the most policy-relevant of the three: India’s public childcare infrastructure has collapsed.

The World Bank’s global review of childcare investment treats this as a case of market failure. Left to itself, the private market struggles to deliver childcare that is simultaneously affordable for lower-income households, financially viable for providers and of decent quality (Devercelli and Beaton-Day, 2020). India spends about 0.15% of GDP on care infrastructure, compared with an OECD average of roughly 0.7% (Mitra and Ramesh 2025; Devercelli and Beaton-Day, 2020).

The consequences of that under-investment show up in the collapse of India’s crèche network. Government data show the number of state-supported crèches falling from 23,292 in 2014/15 to just 3,045 in 2024/25 – an 87% decline. The number of children benefiting from these facilities fell even further: from 582,000 to just over 52,000, a drop of 91% (see Figure 7).

Figure 7: Public childcare provision: number of beneficiary children and number of crèches, 2014/15 versus 2024/25

Source: Lok Sabha Unstarred Questions No. 5101 (2015) and No. 3495 (2025)

This is not a case of demand drying up. A recent survey of women in Gujarat, Kerala, Meghalaya and Odisha found that 84% would use a childcare facility if it were free. Around two-thirds of the surveyed women were relying on informal or personal arrangements instead (IWWAGE and SEWA, 2023). This implies that women’s employment decisions are made against the background of a childcare system that remains limited in both coverage and affordability.

Why the fix keeps stalling

Despite what appears to be a clear diagnosis of the problem, India hasn’t built the childcare infrastructure that the numbers call for nor generated the kind of jobs that would make care and paid work more compatible. But why?

Part of the answer lies in existing institutional constraint: responsibility for financing and delivering childcare sits almost entirely with the Ministry of Women and Child Development, even though the returns (a larger labour force, higher household incomes and better outcomes for children) are spread across the whole economy (Mitra and Ramesh, 2025).

There is also a financing design problem. Where employer-supported childcare is mandated, it is typically pegged to firm size (Mitra and Ramesh, 2025). The burden falls on a narrow set of larger, formal employers, while most women, who work in small or informal enterprises, get no coverage at all. The World Bank also warns that placing the entire cost on employers can backfire. Firms facing a childcare mandate may hire fewer women rather than absorb the cost (Devercelli and Beaton-Day, 2020).

On the jobs side, the displacement evidence suggests that generic ‘more jobs’ growth is not sufficient on its own. New jobs need to be created in ways that don’t let men simply displace women again (Deshpande and Singh, 2021).

What the numbers suggest for policy

Childcare functions as economic infrastructure, not welfare spending. One estimate suggests that public investment of around 2% of GDP in care infrastructure could generate roughly 11 million jobs, with women likely to fill close to 70% of them (Mitra and Ramesh, 2025).

Quebec’s introduction of heavily subsidised universal childcare in 1997 offers the closest real-world test of what sustained investment can do. Research tracking mothers for decades after the policy began finds that the employment gains were modest at first – about five percentage points more mothers working – but grew over time into much larger earnings gains, reaching 27% higher earnings by age 50. This was driven by mothers staying in better jobs longer rather than simply entering the workforce (Baker et al, 2026).

The Quebec case study also shows that such policies can ‘pay for themselves’. The programme’s own tax revenue and reduced welfare payments recovered between 75% and 117% of its upfront cost. Childcare investment does not just get women into jobs. Given enough time, it changes the trajectory of those jobs and covers its own costs. Quebec’s labour market is far more formal than India’s, so the mechanism, not the magnitude, is what should carry over.

The CMIE evidence shows that women’s limited toehold in employment is easily lost to churn or displacement. ILO research points toward sectoral strategies targeting labour-intensive industries with demonstrated capacity to employ women, such as apparel, food processing and care services, organised near residential areas (Chaudhary and Verick, 2014). Existing employment schemes should report against care-compatible access indicators, not simply jobs created (Fletcher et al, 2018).

Public childcare provision should not depend on employer size. A design that puts the obligation on firms above a threshold will always leave out the informal and small-enterprise workforce where most Indian women work. Extending coverage means public delivery that reaches these workers directly, rather than relying on employer compliance to do it (Mitra and Ramesh, 2025).

The bottom line

India’s Vision 2047 depends on turning the churn documented in this piece into continuous work. Women need jobs that they can keep through marriage and motherhood, not just enter and lose within a year. Crèche enrolment and childcare spending will show whether that shift is underway well before the next headline on women’s labour force participation does so.

Where can I find out more?

Economic Policy for Women Led Development Network: EPWD produces research to inform policy and support a more gender-inclusive future of work, aiming to position women as central to India’s growth story.

IZA Institute of Labor Economics: This research organisation publishes work on Indian labour markets.

Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University: This institution produces an annual State of Working India report, including commentary on how to improve working conditions and job creation.

India Employment Report 2024: The third in a series of regular reports by the Institute for Human Development on labour and employment issues in partnership with the ILO.