RUSSIA / INDIA
Women and the
NEP
SINCE taking office after last summer's general elections in India, the minority Congress-l government has implemented a series of economic reforms as part of its
New Economic Policy (NEP). The measures take India further down the path of economic liberalization and deregulation opened up in the 1980s by former Congress
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
As part of its response to the job losses and price rises provoked by the reforms, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions
(CITU - union centre of the Communist Party-Marxist) and smaller leftwing unions called a general strike for June 16.
The call was heeded by workers in the major urban centres, closing down factories and banks across the country. The government responded with repression, including the preemptive arrest of up to 10,000 "potential strikers"
The following article examines the specific impact of the
NEP on women. It originally appeared in the July 4 issue of the Bombay-based Weekend Observer.
VIBHUTI PATEL
N response to external bankruptcy, the government has adopted a new economic policy (NEP) that involves reducing public investment, devaluation, slashing of subsidies on food and fertilizers, and cutting the budget for development planning, capitalintensive and hi-tech productive activities.
It also involves cutbacks in government expenditure, increases in banking and insurance charges as well as rail fares. In a nutshell, the policy aims at capital, energy and import intensive growth with the help of devaluation, denationalization, deregulation and deflation. What are its implications for the toiling women?
### Sick industries
The NEP has decreed a large number of private and public sector units economically unviable and therefore "sick". ". This has resulted in millions of job losses Within a year of the introduction of the NEP disinvestment in public sector units, closures and retrenchment have rendered 6.6 million jobless, according to the 1991 annual survey of industry. Recruitment in insurance companies, banks and the railways has virtually stopped. There is also massive retrenchment in the textile industry, with women being fired first. Already, 50% of jobs in factories supported by NTC have gone.
According to the 1991 census, women's participation rate (WPR) is 23%. For rural women, WPR is 27% while for urban women it is 10%. There has been a considerable rise in WPR since the 1971 and 1981 censuses.
However, a sectoral profile shows that most women workers in rural areas are in occupations such as weaving, handicrafts, tailoring, forestry, sale of fish, silk and poultry farming. In urban areas, the majority of women workers are either in the construction sector or in the nursing and teaching professions, working either on a contract-basis or self-employed.
In predominantly tribal states such as 1 7 Sikkim, Arunachal, Nagaland and Mani-
INDIA pur, the WPR of women is higher but quality of employment in terms of wages or income and working conditions is deplorable. In all three sectors, women are losing ground in the organized sector.
Subcontracting, home-based production, the family labour system and payment of wages on a piece rate basis are the lot of women. According to the 1991 census, 19% of the total female workforce constitutes unpaid family workers.
Even in the state with the highest literacy, Kerala, only 17% of women are gainfully employed. The new economic policy will only reinforce this trend of informalization of the workforce. As it is, 94% of women workers are in the unorganized sector.
### Flexible labour force
The key to the NEP is the notion of the formation of a "flexible labour force"
"Efficiency" and "productivity" are its two other concerns. A shift from a stable/organized labour force to "flexible"
workforce has meant hiring women on a part-time basis and substituting cheap female labour for better-paid male workers.
This expresses itself in the closure of large units in industrial towns and cities; the work once done by large factories is now being done by tribal and rural girls on a piece-rate basis for ancillaries of the same company. The NEP not only perpetuates but also strengthens pre-existing conditions of inequity between women and men.
In the name of increasing marginal efficiency of financial capital there have been attacks on women's access to credit, extension services and input subsidies. The same concern for efficiency and proper management of public funds, however, is not to be seen when it comes to stock market speculators.
The banks now indicted in the country's biggest financial scam increased their interest rates to the detriment of self-employed women depending on loans. Consequently, they have to either aban- Consequentlv, they have to sithor han don their small businesses or fall prey to private moneylenders charging compound rates of interest.
NEP's attack on credit has affected millions of self-employed poor women. As a result, the burden of debt-repayment of assetless women has increased.
Liberalization of the economy has not quite liberated the working woman. Elimination of 7,000 licences, scrapping of MRTP limits and reductions on customs duties on capital goods have given free grazing ground for foreign capital. Following economic liberalization seve18 ral foreign firms, including Union Carbide, have been given the right to fish in
Indian waters. As a result 50,000 fisherfolk have lost their livelihoods. Food processing industries with foreign collaboration are being established. The result will be a major shift in crop patterns from subsistence production to cash crop production
This process will affect women's employment in agriculture, as all studies have shown that women are the first to lose their jobs during a shift from subsistence to cash crop production. This has been seen in the "green revolution" areas of Punjab and Haryana.
A major restructuring of the Indian economy is underway. In 1970, India had 60 million economically active women; in
1990 this had risen to 76 million. However, according to UN estimates, the economic activity rate has fallen from 38% to
29% in the same period.
Of the total female workforce, a mere
2% are administrative and managerial workers, 11% are clerks, sales and service workers, 15% are industrial and transport workers and 31% work in agriculture and hunting. These figures show that the NEP has further marginalized women from the agricultural and manufacturing sectors.
True, there will be some increase in the employment of women in the service sector. More women will find work in the informal industrial sectors in electronics, diamond, garments and pharmaceuticals.
But here again, there is a disturbing underlying reality. As production is globalized, research and management are controlled by the First World, while strenuous, monotonous, "unskilled" and "semi-skilled" work is being done by Third World women.
Low pay in informal sector
Lamenting this situation, the United Nations Report The World's Women: 1970-1990 states, "The informal sector is by no means a panacea for women. It is far less secure than formal sector work and it generally pays less than the minimum wage". In other words it is nothing less than disguised colonization of Third World women.
The 1992 budget saw big cuts in funds and resources for development programmes and reductions in subsidies, resulting in sharp rises in the prices of essential products. The deaths of unemployed weavers in Andhra Pradesh has exposed the absurdity of government proclamations about self-sufficiency in food. Slashing spending on poverty relief and job creation programs has increased poverty. "Market-friendly" policies have led to galloping inflation and, as the UN report states, "the burden of inflation has fallen heavily on women
International Viewpoint # 235 • September 28, 1992 who are responsible for procuring staple goods for the household"
Cuts in health and education programs will directly affect the already high mortality/morbidity rates among Indian women as well as standards of literacy.
In the 1991 budget, the only item concerning women for which the allocation of funds has increased is "population control" . Massive sums have been provided by the USAID to push controversial contraceptives like Norplant/Net-O-En which are banned in the West. Targeting poor women for birth control has been a crucial NEP concern. Poor women are also blamed for causing the environmental crisis by breeding like "cats" and "rats"
Ethics of population control
This raises two crucial issues. Firstly, to what extent can top-down population control programmes that violate the integrity of a women's body be justified? Secondly, to focus narrowly on "population explosion" as the cause of the environmental crisis is to ignore other factors such as industrial toxic waste, chemical fertilizers, nuclear arms or over-consumption by the affluent. In First World coun tries the environment has continued to deteriorate despite falling birth rates.
We must learn from the experience of countries in Africa and Latin America which undertook structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s. Even the World Bank has declared the 1980-90 decade as the decade of "mal-development" in Africa and Latin America. Nonetheless, it is pushing India down the same path.
What India needs is an alternative economic model which reorients our economy towards the assessed needs of the masses, which promotes production processes which are ecologically sensitive and women-friendly and which ensures sustainable development alongside just distribution. *
ISRAEL