Women workers lag behind in urban centres of state

The proportion of women workers or women WPR is surprisingly the lowest in the urban centres like Ahmedabad (13%),Kutch (15%),Surat (15%),Rajkot (17%) and the state capital Gandhinagar (19%),reveals the first set of final data from the Population Enumeration exercise (held in February 2011) that was released at Census Bhavan. So far,the data released from Census 2011 pertained to house listing and housing census.

This disparity with regard to the women workforce comes as a surprise as Ahmedabad (84%),Surat (79%),Rajkot (58%) are the top three urbanised centres in the state as per the Census 2011.

That’s not all. The dip in women WPR comes during a decade when the growth in literacy rate among women were more than men in all the districts of Gujarat,where the growth in man literacy between 2001-11 was little over 6% and the percentage growth in literate women in Gujarat was almost 12%. The dip in women WPR also belongs to a period when the total workforce of Gujarat increased by over 35 lakh workers.

Census department officials point out that the poor woman WPR occurs in districts that also have a poor sex ratio. For instance,Surat (787 women),Ahmedabad (904),Kutch (908) and Gandhinagar (923) feature in the top five districts that have a poor sex ratio.

The dip in woman WPR has also marginally pulled down Gujarat’s overall WPR to 41% from the 41.9% in census 2001. “Any dip in WPR indicates that the number of unemployed and dependent have increased,” said S Lingasamy,deputy director of Directorate of Census Operations (Gujarat),who released the data.

As per the census figures,the proportion of women workers is the highest in districts of the Dangs (49%),Tapi (49%),Dahod (43%),Narmada (41%) and Panchmahals (36%) where the dependence on agriculture is more.

Meanwhile,the lowest man WPR has been reported from the tribal district of Dahod (50%),while the highest man WPR has been recorded in Surat at 63%.