Get women employment to 100%

There are plenty of stuff to be changed in India, but we cannot focus on everything. If I had to pick only one, I put all my energies around one thing:

Get women employment to 100%

You might think it is crazy, but this one aspect can bootstrap India and put us on a path to being a developed nation. To fix this one thing, we have to fix a number of other things.

Over the years, I have been studying the socioeconomic aspects of various countries including Europe, China, Bangladesh etc. One way China went way ahead of India is their female workforce participation is substantially high and that masked many of their weaknesses.Bangladesh is substantially weak compared to India on many things. But, recently they have had a substantial progress on the social front. The key behind that is a lucky break got from a US policy that penalizes large textile exporters like India and China. Bangladesh was able to use the convoluted policy to become a major textile player and that industry is predominantly run by women. Just this one fact has masked hundreds of their weak points.Getting women to workforce can be the antidote to many of India’s fundamental problems:

Many women endure domestic violence and abuse because they don’t have an alternative. If they had economic independence there would be less violence and their children would grow up in a better environment.Parents don’t educate women as well because they think women are not going to work. If the women actually worked in large numbers, their education levels would go up, their families would take them seriously. There would be less female infanticide, fewer cases of dowry, better gender balance etc.

If the women are better educated, there will be a drop in fertility rates, bringing the population under control. The children will be better taken care of, bringing down malnutrition, infant mortality and other key health issues.

To get women employment to 100% we have to fix a lot of workplace issues and dramatically improve safety all around — that would not just help working women, but society in general.

If the families become dual earning their purchasing power would go up, bringing down poverty.

Given that India educates a large number of women, whose potential languishes in the kitchen, this is the biggest brain drain [to the kitchen] that we will able to avoid and bring massive technological improvement.

As women get more power it will break many of the existing power structures — many Indian politicians rely on goondaism to get to power — and the entry of new power centers could weaken the traditional way politics is done.

Thus, bringing women will cause a ripple effect that could fix many of India’s ills in poverty, health, safety, human development etc.

The question is what policies will get us there?

Make it a government’s mission to bring women back to the workforce after taking a break to rear children. There must be targeted policy where government works with the private sector in bringing them back to the workforce quickly. This policy would really improve talent pool available to corporations and make our companies more cost competitive.

Make conditions easy for working parents. Office should provide arrangements for breastfeeding and fathers should be encouraged to take days off to share the workload. There should be large community day cares where we use the services of lonely senior citizens training them in a service bringing a win-win to everyone.

Identify sectors that can hire a lot of women [like textiles] and provide them special incentives to grow. This could turn many sick industries into profitable ones and drive up our GDP.

Provide safe, subsidized hostels in partnership with the private sector for working women across all Indian towns and provide for specific routes [to and from the public transportation] that are well guarded. Have zero tolerance policy in case of sexual abuse.

Build hiring tools that make it very easy for anyone to find jobs [men and women]. Government can use its bully power to build a common marketplace [revamping the employment exchange] where all companies are mandated to put their open job offerings and allow a common interface to apply to specific jobs. In the long run it will make it very easy for companies to hire talent and send massive benefits across