India is the 12th worst country for gender disparity in labour force
New Delhi: India performs poorly when it comes to gender parity in labour force participation, according to data from the United Nations Human Development Report (UNHDR).
Of the 20 countries with the widest difference in male and female labour force participation rates, India — ranked 12th — is the only non-Islamic country.
The UN defines labour force participation rate as the “proportion of the working-age population (ages 15 and older) that engages in the labour market, either by working or actively looking for work, expressed as a percentage of the working-age population”.
In India, the male labour participation rate is 78.8 per cent while the number for females is just 27.2 per cent — a difference of 51.6 per cent.
India is also far below the global female participation average of 48.7 per cent.
The worst performing country in terms of gender disparity is Afghanistan, where the difference is 67.2 per cent, followed by Yemen and the Syrian Arab Republic.
In India’s immediate neighbourhood, all countries except Pakistan perform better.
Pakistan, with a difference of 57.8 per cent, stands fourth in the list, while Bangladesh (46.8) is 18th, Sri Lanka (39) is 25th. Nepal is the best performing South Asian country — it stands 169th with a difference of just 3.2 per cent.
Economic superpowers US and China are not in the top 100 of this list — China is 104th with a difference of 14.6 per cent, while the US is 114th with a difference of 12.6 per cent.
The only two countries in the world where more females are part of the workforce than males are African nations Burundi (difference of -2.7 per cent) and Mozambique (-7.9 per cent).
In Mozambique, 82.5 per cent of working-age females are part of the labour market, as are 74.6 per cent of males. The corresponding figures for Burundi are 80.2 per cent and 77.5 per cent.
Expert opinion
Ashwini Deshpande, professor at the Delhi School of Economics, who specialises in discrimination, gender and affirmative action, said this was a worrying situation for India.
“The female labour force participation rate in India, which is already low, has declined over the last decade. This is not because women don’t want to work. There is a great deal of demand for work, but decent work is not available,” she said.
Deshpande also pointed to the burden of domestic unpaid work the women have to bear.
“On the domestic front, it is the burden of domestic work that keeps women out of the formal labour force. They do a large range of activities that are economic activities, but are unpaid,” she said.
Deshpande refused to buy the train of thought that Islam was a barrier to women’s freedom to work — after all, Muslim-majority countries like Sierra Leone, Azerbaijan and Nigeria are all ranked below 140 in the list.
“It is wrong to focus on Islam as a barrier to women’s labour force participation. Bangladesh is an Islamic country, but has a higher rate of female participation than India,” she said.
Courtesy: theprint.in
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Gurugram Police arrest BJP Yuva Morcha member for spreading fake murder story on social media
New Delhi: Gurugram Police have arrested BJP Yuva Morcha member Hariom Mishra, for allegedly spreading a fabricated and communally sensitive story on social media about the murder of a college student in Gurugram.
Mishra who is also known as Shaurya Mishra had shared a collage of four photographs on his X handle earlier this month. He claimed that a 24-year-old college student, identified as Nikita Agarwal, had been murdered by her classmate Arif Khan in Gurugram. In the post, he alleged that the woman was blackmailed, forced into prostitution, gangraped, and eventually killed. He also claimed that Arif dumped her body in a forest. The claims were presented as being based on police sources.
The post went viral and garnering over 1.5 lakh views, and was amplified by several right-wing social media handles across X, Facebook and Instagram. A verification of the claims revealed that no such incident had taken place in Gurugram. A search of credible news reports showed no record of any such murder. The police said this news would have inevitably attracted media attention if it were true.
On December 11, Gurugram Police publicly refuted the claims through their official X handle. They stated that the information which was being circulated was completely false. The police warned that legal action would be taken against those spreading misinformation. Despite the warning, Mishra neither deleted the post nor issued any clarification.
Police in Gurugram confirmed Mishra's arrest on December 16. The police said a FIR was filed after he continued to spread false information about the alleged murder of a Hindu woman by Muslim man. Police said Mishra, a resident of Uttar Pradesh's Kaushambi district, is now being investigated.
Gurugram Police spokesperson Sandeep Singh told The Print that the accused had deliberately misrepresented facts and used objectionable content to spread hatred along religious lines. “Such posts can create serious disturbances in society, and the police take these matters very seriously,” he said.
A reverse image search conducted by fact-checkers at Alt News, revealed that the photographs used in the viral post were unrelated to the claims, while two of the images were traced to a Pinterest account belonging to influencer Maulik Chopra and another image was sourced from an Instagram post by influencer Shivam Thakur featuring a woman named Deepanshi Rawat. The fourth image was found on an unrelated Instagram page. The images depicted different individuals and had no connection to any crime.
Police said they are also investigating Mishra’s motive behind sharing the false and provocative content.
