February 2014 – Page 2

If India’s future lies in its cities where women hardly work, we must all worry

February 13, 2014February 12, 2014 Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Nearly 400m people live in cities in India and during the next 40 years that number will more than double. Not only is the proportion of India’s total female population that is economically active among the lowest in the world, but urban areas do even worse. New analysis of data from the 2011 census shows only half as many urban women work as their rural counterparts.

Few states – including Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia – do worse than India when it comes to women’s participation in the workforce. Others such as Somalia, Bahrain and Malaysia do much better. Among the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) which are comparable emerging economies, India has the lowest female participation rate, with only 29% of women over the age of 15 working. As the chart below shows, even among the MINT countries – Mexico, Nigeria, Indonesia and Turkey – only Turkey has the same participation rate as India.

In mainly agricultural economies, urban women often find less work than rural ones. Half the working population in India is employed by the agricultural sector. But agriculture’s contribution to Indian economy has been steadily falling and is now less than half that of the services industry. This should have corresponded with rapid growth in numbers of working women in cities, but that hasn’t happened.

Economists have tried to understand this discrepancy. Some cite the problem to be India’s unemployment rate among the young, who make more than half of the population. But such joblessness should affect both men and women, and it also doesn’t explain the long-term trend of low women’s workforce participation rates. Others believe that younger people in cities are staying in education for longer. While that certainly contributes to the overall picture, it cannot explain the large difference between urban and rural figures.

Some discrepancy may arise because many women are involved in home-based work and are part of the informal sector, where their contribution tends to be under-reported. “Better enumeration will help, but measurement is not the only reason participation rates are so low in India, especially in urban areas,” Sher Verick, a senior fellow at the International Labour Organisation, said.

Patriarchy rules

According to Verick, the two main factors keeping women at home are social customs and very low education levels among women.

Breaking such customs is hard. Preet Rustagi, joint director of Institute for Human Development in Delhi, said: “To a certain extent, men control women’s lives. And women have internalised this as the norm. In such situations, the little work they do is the result of compulsion, such as when the household income is not enough, rather than choice.”

The power of social norms may be partially explained based on data from the city of Leicester in the UK, where one in four city-dwellers is of Indian background. According to a 2010 report by Sheffield Hallam University: “Economic activity rates among Indian women in Leicester are nine percentage points lower than for Indian women nationally.” In a large enough group of Indians, those social norms are more strongly held than when Indians are widely dispersed in the rest of the UK.

Although education levels have improved in recent decades, not as many educated women have found work.

“In India, there is a U-shaped relationship between education and participation of women in the workforce,” Verick said. “Illiterates participate more out of necessity. Women with a middle-level education (below graduate) have different aspirations and can afford to remain out of the workforce. Only better educated women have been ‘pulled’ into the labour force in response to better paid opportunities.”

Rustagi said a skills shortage among women is also to blame. “There is a large divide between what they can do and what jobs are on offer.” For instance, the lowest worker sex ratio is seen in construction, manufacturing and the retail trade, which are booming in cities.

The safety of women is also a concern in Indian cities, as was highlighted after the 2012 Delhi gang rape case. Better governance and improved policing ought to help, but urban India’s gender imbalance is a deeper cause for worry. The national average is 940 females per 1,000 males, but that drops to 912 for cities with a population larger than 1m. The imbalance is greater still in India’s biggest cities, with Delhi at 867 females per 1,000 males and Mumbai at 861.

The discrepancy in these figures may be partly explained by the mass migration of workers, mainly men, from rural to urban areas, according to Varsha Joshi, director of India’s census operations. But the drop is large enough that further investigation is needed to spot other reasons.

Empty promises

There are some positive signs. According to India’s National Sample Survey, the proportion of working women in urban areas has increased from 11.9% in 2001 to 15.4% in 2011. Rustagi said: “One of the fastest-growing sectors for urban working women has been domestic work. About 1.5m urban women were added to that sector in the last decade, which is more than one in ten jobs created for women in that time.”

But the areas that have shown the most significant growth, such as domestic work, tend to fall into the category of “informal” work – and under India’s labour laws, these workers have few workplace rights. This makes it harder for women to have sustainable jobs, let alone a career.

Indians go to the polls in April and, partly as a result of the focus of women’s issues, most parties have adopted promises about women’s empowerment as part of their campaigns, but none have spelt these promises out in any detail.

First published on The Conversation. Image credit: trinitycarefoundation

If GDP confuses you, here’s some much-needed clarity

February 9, 2014 Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Although it wasn’t created to measure progress, a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) quickly became the single measure that defined progress. Economist Diane Coyle has written a nice essay in Aeon magazine that explains GDP and its limitations, while putting it in historical context. Here are some highlights:

GDP is the sum in a given time period of everything produced in the economy with a monetary value, which should add up to the same figure as the incomes earned by every person and company, and the same as the total spent by everyone. In practice, these separate sides of the accounts are rarely equal because of the difficulty of getting all that data.
GDP was first developed in 1934, and it soon became the main tool for measuring a country’s economy.
Most people complain about GDP because it doesn’t measure non-monetary costs, which include environmental damage and social welfare. That is why a national disaster (or war) spurs faster GDP growth, but the loss of life and assets will not be included.
GDP is meant to measure market activities and, by definition, housework is not in the market; but there’s no market price for government activities either, and they are included.
While changes made to it later introduced hedonistic factors to include innovation, the list of products are severely limited.
Initially GDP didn’t count financial trading, but now it does. This leads to situations where, for instance, the biggest contribution from the financial sector to the UK economy occurred in the final quarter of 2008, which is when the financial crisis started.
GDP served as a decent measure when economic activity and social welfare went hand in hand, but now the gap between the two is widening.

In the end Coyle suggests that GDP is a flawed but useful number. That is why it must not be scrapped or changed. Instead newer measures for uncounted things need to be given more importance such as OECD’s Better Life Index.

China’s exceptionally well-preserved fossils may have been the result of a volcanic eruption

February 5, 2014February 5, 2014 Akshat RathiLeave a comment

A series of fossil discoveries in the 1990s changed our understanding of the lives of early birds and mammals, as well as the dinosaurs they shared an ecosystem with. All those discoveries had one thing in common: they came from a small region in northern China that preserved what is now called the Jehol Biota.

Until now, however, no one knew why so many well-preserved fossils have been found in that region. In a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers have found that this remarkable preservation might have been the result of a Pompeii-like event, where hot ash from a volcanic eruption entombed these animals.

Dino colours

According to Sarah Gabbott at Leicester University, who wasn’t involved in the study, “unravelling the environments in which fossilisation took place, as the authors do in this paper, is very important. It places the fossils within the context of their habitat and it allows us to determine what filters and biases may have played a part.” These biases may affect which organisms get preserved.

The fossils of the Jehol Biota are from the Early Cretaceous period, about 130 million years ago, and they comprise a wide variety of animals and plants. So far, about 60 species of plants, 1000 species of invertebrates, and 140 species of vertebrates have been found in the Jehol Biota.

Photos show the typical entombing poses of the Jehol terrestrial vertebrate fossils. This boxer-like pose is typical of victims of pyroclastic density currents, resulting from postmortem tendons and muscles shortening. Baoyu Jiang

One of the most remarkable discoveries to arise from these fossils came in 2010, when Michael Benton of the University of Bristol found colour-banding preserved in dinosaur fossils. These stripes of light and dark are similar to stripes in modern birds, and provided further evidence that dinosaurs that evolved into birds. Benton also found that these fossils had intact melanosomes – organelles that make pigments. This discovery allowed paleontologists, for the first time, to tell the colours of dinosaurs’ feathers.

Rising from the ashes

Baoyu Jiang of Nanjing University, the lead researcher of the new study, has been studying fossils from Jehol Biota for more than a decade. “About two years ago, we realised that the sediments and their enclosing skeletons may provide key clues about what happened to these animals when they were killed and buried,” he said.

The fact that so many fossils were found exquisitely preserved from the same time period suggested some form of mass death. Even before Baoyu started this work, there were suggestions that volcanoes may have been responsible.

Using 14 different fossils from five locations within the deposits, Baoyu found marks of fast-moving ash and hot gas, known as pyroclastic flows, that can only result from a nearby volcanic eruption. The bones showed black streaks, which suggests charring had occurred.

Almost Pompeii

But questions remain. The area that supported the Jehol Biota is suspected to have been a wetland with many lakes. Most fossils are found in lakebeds, suggesting that either the fossils were washed into these lakes by floods or that the animals were in the lakes before fossilisation took place.

Baoyu believes that if fossils don’t separate at bone joints, it means the animals must have been in the lake before dying. But that is not a convincing argument, Gabbott said. “A freshly dead carcass, buoyed by decay gases which collect in the stomach, can be transported for tens if not hundreds of kilometres without such disarticulation (separation of bones at joints).”

No other fossil location, let alone that which produced so many well-preserved samples, has ever been suggested to have undergone a similar event. A comparison can be made to what happened in Pompeii in 79 AD, when Mount Vesuvius erupted. The ensuing destruction led to the preservation of the city’s architecture and objects but not of people or animals. The human and animal remains we see from Pompeii are plaster casts of the empty spaces their decomposed bodies left in the ash.

Still, Jehol Biota and Pompeii both show how mass tragedies at the feet of volacanoes can preserve the past for future generations to discover.

First published on The Conversation. Image credit: Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing