Impact of COVID-19’s Men’s Reverse Migration on Female’s Labour Market Opportunities

Before covid-19 even struck, India already had one of the lowest female labour force participation rates (FLFPR) in the world and the pandemic made things worse. FLFPR refers to the share of women who are either working or actively looking for work. By August 2021, India's FLFPR had dropped to 16.1 per cent during the July–September 2020 quarter.

In all three districts surveyed, Chitrakoot, Tikamgarh and Udaipur, women doing local daily wage work were paid Rs. 50 less than men for the same work. Men earned Rs. 300 per day while women earned Rs. 250. Even under MGNREGA, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, a government scheme that guarantees 100 days of paid work per year to rural households and is supposed to pay men and women equally, the actual rate varied by village, with most workers reporting Rs. 300 but some receiving only Rs. 250.

The single biggest reason households reported a fall in income due to covid-19 was reduced hours or days of work, cited by 82.7 per cent of all income-affected households overall, rising to as high as 94.13 per cent in Chitrakoot. Reduced wage rates or produce prices were the second most common reason, cited by 36.3 per cent overall. Job loss by a family member was cited by 15 per cent overall but was most severe in Udaipur at 26.27 per cent.

A woman's ability to work outside the home depended heavily on societal and gender-based constraints, as well as the physical presence of a male family member. Scheduled Caste (SC) members had the greatest compulsion to work, owning little land and having little bargaining power. It was specifically the Kol tribes of Chitrakoot who were noted as migrating more frequently. Brahmin families were rarely seen engaging in migration at all. Upper-caste women, particularly from Thakur families, faced pressure not to work for two reasons – first, a wife's employment was seen as a sign that the husband was living off her earnings, which was considered deeply shameful and second, women of elevated social standing were simply not expected to need to work at all.

Of the 2,033 households surveyed across 100 villages, over half (50.91 per cent) had at least one male member who returned home during the pandemic and had still not gone back to the city at the time of the survey. A further 29.12 per cent had members who returned and went back multiple times but were back in the city at the time of the survey. Only 4.87 per cent reported a permanent return.

When women respondents were asked about their paid work, almost all instinctively said "kuch nahi karti houn" ("I do not do any work”) before going on to list the paid jobs they actually held. The authors describe this as the invisibilisation of women's work. The devaluation of their work is so deeply internalised that women themselves do not recognise its significance or claim it as work. One respondent who earned Rs. 2,000 per month as a schoolteacher still described her work as merely "passing time".

When asked about the domestic consequences of their husbands' return, women gave sharply divided responses. Some said the additional person at home increased their household workload, while others felt a sense of relief as chores were now shared between the two. A significant number said their domestic burden stayed exactly the same regardless of whether their husband was present or not.

Focus and Factoids by Anurima Biswas.

PARI Library's health archive project is part of an initiative supported by the Azim Premji University to develop a free-access repository of health-related reports relevant to rural India.