NEW DELHI: For years, Sanchuri Bhuniya fought her parents’ pleas to settle down. She wanted to travel and earn money – not become a housewife.

       So in 2019, Bhuniya snuck out of her isolated village in eastern India. She took a train hundreds of km south to the city of Bengaluru and found work in a garment factory earning US$120 (RM527) a month.

       The job liberated her. “I ran away,” she said.

       “That’s the only way I was able to go.”

       That life of financial freedom ended abruptly with the arrival of Covid-19.

       In 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared a nationwide lockdown to curb infections, shutting almost all businesses.

       Within a few weeks, more than 100 million Indians lost their jobs, including Bhuniya, who was forced to return to her village and never found another stable employer.

       As the world climbs out of the pandemic, economists warn of a troubling data point: Failing to restore jobs for women – who have been less likely than men to return to the workforce – could shave trillions of dollars off global economic growth.

       The forecast is particularly bleak in developing countries like India, where female labour force participation fell so steeply that it’s now in the same league as war-torn Yemen.

       This week’s episode of “The Pay Cheque” podcast explores how the coronavirus accelerated an already worrying trend in the world’s second-most populous country.

       Between 2010 and 2020, the number of working women in India dropped from 26% to 19%, according to data compiled by the World Bank. As infections surged, a bad situation turned dire: Economists in Mumbai estimate that female employment plummeted to 9% by 2022.

       This is disastrous news for India’s economy, which had started slowing before the pandemic.

       Modi has prioritised job creation, pressing the country to strive for amrit kaal, a golden era of growth. But his administration has made little progress in improving prospects for working women.

       That’s especially true in rural areas, where more than two-thirds of India’s 1.3 billion people live, conservative mores reign and jobs have been evaporating for years.

       Despite the nation’s rapid economic expansion, women have struggled to make the transition to working in urban centres.

       Closing the employment gap between men and women – a whopping 58 percentage points – could expand India’s gross domestic product (GDP) by close to a third by 2050.

       That equates to nearly US$6 trillion (RM26 trillion) in constant US dollar terms, according to a recent analysis from Bloomberg Economics.

       Doing nothing threatens to derail the country on its quest to become a competitive producer for global markets. Though women in India represent 48% of the population, they contribute only around 17% of GDP compared with 40% in China.

       India is an extreme illustration of a global phenomenon.

       Gender disparities

       Across the world, women were more likely than men to lose jobs during the pandemic, and their recovery has been slower. Policy changes that address gender disparities and boost the number of working women –improved access to education, child care, or flexible work arrangements, for example –would help add about US$20 trillion (RM88 trillion) to global GDP by 2050, according to Bloomberg Economics.

       For workers like Bhuniya, 23, the pandemic had heavy consequences. After losing her job, she struggled to afford food in Bengaluru and eventually returned to her remote village, Patrapali, in the state of Odisha. Bhuniya doesn’t think she’ll have another opportunity to leave. She no longer earns a steady income, but her family worries about her safety as a single woman living in a distant city.

       “If I run away again, my mother will curse me,” said Bhuniya.

       “Now, there’s nothing left. My account is empty and there’s little work in the village.”

       The story echoes across India. During the pandemic, Rosa Abraham, an economics professor at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, tracked more than 20,000 people as they navigated the labour market.

       Less likely to recover work

       She found that after the first lockdown, women were several times more likely to lose their jobs than men and far less likely to recover work after restrictions were lifted.

       Increased domestic duties, lack of childcare options after school shutdowns, and a surge in marriages – which often confine women’s autonomy in India – help explain the difference in outcome.

       “When men are faced with this kind of a huge economic shock, then they have a fallback option,” Abraham said.

       “They can navigate to different kinds of work. But for women, there is no such fallback option. They can’t negotiate the labour market as effectively as men do.”

       Dreams of freedom or a well-paid office job were replaced with what she called “distress-led employment,” essentially unpaid work on a family farm or taking care of the home.

       Prior to the pandemic, Indian women already performed about 10 times more care work than men, around three times the global average.

       “It is the unfortunate situation that the decision to work is often not in the hands of the woman herself,” Abraham said.

       The decline in workforce participation is partly about culture.

       As Indians became wealthier, families that could afford to keep women at home did so, thinking it conferred social status.

       On the other extreme, those at the lowest rungs of society are still seen as potential earners. But they tend to work menial or unpaid jobs far from the formal economy. In the official statistics, their labour is not counted.

       In many villages, patriarchal values remain ironclad, and a stigma against girls persists. Though illegal, sex-selective abortions are still common.

       Akhina Hansraj, senior programme manager at Akshara Centre, a Mumbai-based organisation that advocates for gender equity, said Indian men often think “it’s not very manly if their wife contributes to the family income.”

       “They want to create this dependency,” Hansraj said.

       “People believe if women get educated, they might work and become financially independent and then they may not obey and respect the family.”

       Marriage a sticking point

       Marriage is a sticking point in India, where most weddings are still arranged. After the first lockdown, in 2020, the country’s leading matrimony websites reported a spike in new registrations.

       In some states, marriages among children and young adults – many of them illegal under Indian law – jumped by 80%, according to government data.

       Madhu Sharma, a Hindi teacher at the Pardada Pardadi Educational Society, a girls’ school in the northern town of Anupshahr, said she might intervene in three child marriages a year.

       During the pandemic, when the campus closed, the number increased three to four times.

       “Before Covid, children were always in touch with their teachers and also with me,” she said.

       “After Covid, when the children had to stay at home, keeping in contact with them became a big challenge.” — Bloomberg