Labour Law Reforms and Women's Work in India: Assessing the New Labour Codes from a Gender Lens

In recent years, India has seen a wide-ranging retrenchment of hard-won labour rights with serious consequences for working communities in general, and for the rights of women workers. This has only been exacerbated by the global pandemic, which as elsewhere, has exposed and deepened the fault-lines and the structural inequalities that inhere in Indian society. While the country was already witnessing a serious crisis of unemployment prior to the pandemic, the pandemic and the government’s response in the form of a brutal and stringent lockdown that was enforced on 1.3 billion people with 4 hours of notice on 24 March 2020 has had devastating consequences particularly for those in already precarious contexts (Ghosh 2020). This was perhaps emblematically captured in the early days of the pandemic by the heart-wrenching scenes of thousands of migrants, having lost their places of residence and means of livelihood walking for hundreds of miles to reach home with no government support (Biswas 2020; Menon 2020). Studies have already begun to uncover the scale of the loss in jobs, livelihoods, incomes and increase in the levels of hunger and indebtedness since the period of the pandemic, especially for marginalised communities, including for women generally, and women from marginalised communities in particular (Lahoti et al. 2020). A recent survey by ActionAid India found that 78 percent of all informal workers surveyed – both male and female – lost their livelihoods during the lockdown, and for some sectors of feminised employment, the loss in employment was much higher – for instance, 85 percent of women domestic workers surveyed lost their livelihoods (Sapkal et al. 2020). Further, the period of the lockdown saw an increase in women’s unpaid care work burdens, with a survey conducted in Delhi by the Institute of Social Studies Trust indicating that 66 percent of informal women workers from sectors such as home based work, domestic work, street vending, etc. experienced an increase in household domestic chores during the height of the lockdown (Chakraborty 2020).