India needs to grow at 8%, more female workers in high quality jobs to reach developed country status: World Bank report
New Delhi: World Bank senior economist Dhruv Sharma has said India must achieve an approximate growth rate of 8 percent to attain developed country status by 2047, and underscored that achieving such rapid growth is unlikely with the current low level of female workforce participation, media reported.
India has aspirations to become a high-income country by 2047, Sharma noted.
He said that such a high rate of growth will naturally require a faster pace of growth but, the country’s economy is is growing around 6-6.5 percent.
“In order to get to high-income country, it needs to grow closer to 8 percent. And you can't get there if a large part of your workforce – females – are not participating," Sharma said at the release of the World Bank's India Development Update report on October 3 in New Delhi.
"So, for India to go from 6 percent to 8 percent and become a high-income country, you need to get the female labour force participation rate to be higher."
In its India Development Update report, the World Bank noted that while the male and female Worker Population Ratio (WPR) had increased by 1.4 percentage points and 2.3 percentage points, respectively, in January-March 2023 from the year-ago period, the increase in WPR for women was "primarily driven by an increase in the share of women in unpaid work", as per data from the government's Periodic Labour Force Survey reports.
"Moreover, the quality of women's jobs in India is much lower than that of men, and the share of regular salaried employment for women in urban areas is declining.
"According to data from PLFS (2021-22), women in India are almost three times less likely to be employed than men; even when they are employed, the average quality of their jobs is much lower (than) their male counterparts," the report said.
Auguste Kouame, World Bank's Country Director for India, added that raising the female labour force participation rate was a "very important topic" for India, and the Bank would work with all the stakeholders to raise it to the average level of 50 percent for emerging market economies from around 25 percent now.
"We know from data that there has been a lot of investment in women and girls' education in India. India has done really well … in fact, today, there are more girls in universities than boys. So, India has done very well by educating girls and women. It is now time to use their skills and their brain power to power the economy towards becoming a high-income country," Kouame added.
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