Rural wage bias against women, kids

The gender discrimination at work place, be it in rural or urban India, is a fact, says a new government survey, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jan 31, 2008, 02:32:29 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Gender discrimination at the work place, be it in rural or urban India, is a fact, says a new government survey. The bias in the payment of wages and salaries not only overlooks the number of hours put in by men and women but also their educational qualifications.

The findings are part of a study by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) titled "Employment and Unemployment Situation in India".

On an average, in rural India, a woman's daily wage is Rs 20 less than that of a man, though both work equal hours. In the case of daily salary, the difference is of Rs 50.

Wage is the money paid to casual labourers, and salary is for the non-casual worker.

Women and children in rural areas are paid wages as low as Rs 30 and Rs 12 respectively for a day's work, even though they constitute more than 60 per cent of the work force.

This is less than half of the minimum wages prescribed by the various state governments.

The survey notes similar differences in the daily pay packages of men and women in urban areas too.

For a woman, higher education is not a guarantor of higher salary. But for men, the salary increases with the educational level, the survey says. "This trend is only noticeable for women in rural areas, depicting the prevalent mindset that education does not matter for women," says an NSSO official.

A woman with a graduate degree in rural India gets Rs 170 per day; the man gets Rs 239. For a diploma holder, it increases to Rs 212 per day for a woman and Rs 288 for a man.

Children are even more exploited, especially the girl child. In the manufacturing and service sectors, a girl gets just Rs 10 per day in urban areas. Boys are slightly better off with wages close to Rs 30 for a day.

On an average, a wage for the child is Rs 12 per day in these sectors, which employ children in large numbers.

The NSSO data also puts a pivotal question before the government over its claims of banning child labour in the manufacturing and hospitality sector. The survey found that boys continue to work in hotels and restaurants for an average salary of Rs 25 a day in urban India.

Labour ministry officials, however, said the government was considering amendments in the Child Labour (Prohibition) Act to strictly implement ban on child labour in sectors categorized as hazardous under the Act.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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