Analysis

Abstract

The India Discrimination Report 2022 by Oxfam highlights significant gender inequality in the employment sector, despite a decade-long drop in discrimination in India's labor market, to the point that a woman's ability to find decent employment is unrelated to her assets. This essentially suggests that women's employment standing is independent of their educational background. Apart from women, this report discussed the discrimination against the historically oppressed communities such as SCs/STs and religious minorities such as Muslims across three categories of work, namely Regular workers, Self-employed workers, and Casual workers in both urban and rural areas. According to the survey, the lockdown affected Muslim employment and salaries in rural areas while SC/ST communities suffered the greatest losses in urban areas. Particularly during times of such urgency, the government machinery needs to address their unique concerns. Access to health care is another indicator factored in by the report showing that despite a drop over time, Uttar Pradesh continues to be the state with the biggest inequality in the use of hospital resources. The inequalities in inpatient (IPD) care utilization across spending categories are higher the poorer the caste group. It is unfortunate that a significant portion of the population in India still experiences unequal treatment on the job market, despite the country having been independent for 75 years. This is due less to individual merits than it is to the socio-religious subgroups to which they belong, which vary across states, rural and urban areas, and job categories.

Oxfam’s report uses the following three methods to analyze inequality and discrimination:

1. An inequality measure's breakdown and the identification of components associated with discriminatory factors, 

2. Decomposition method based on "the extent of explanation" provided by factors of exclusion.

3. Standard measurements of inequality like the Gini coefficient and Theil's index are frequently broken down by the underlying causes of the disparity using non-parametric approaches.

   
   

In the context of the formation of human capital across various castes, tribal and religious identities as well as gender, the analysis aimed to capture the extent of identity-based discrimination explaining the gaps in access to employment, wages, credit as a factor of production, and health facilities.

By concentrating on the access to credit offered to the agricultural sector through commercial and cooperative banks, it broadens to include factor market discrimination against the SC and ST community.

The overall finding from the examination of the various sections is that, over the past 15 years, discrimination on the Indian labor market has slightly decreased. However, there is significant gender inequality in this, to the point that a woman's endowments are unaffected by her likelihood of finding respectable employment. The mathematical model's unsettling conclusion that genders discrimination is practically universal in the nation follows because of this, the existence of a sizable sector of highly qualified women who are unable to or do not "want" to enter the labor market owing to a variety of causes provides the strongest justification for the high degree of discrimination, as assessed by the model.

Even though it is still significantly high, macroeconomic data from 2004/5 to 2019/20 suggest a minor drop in discrimination against the SC/ST community in the labor market. However, due to government policies of reservation and some success in asset creation among them, this has seen a slight increase in several fields as their level of education and other measurable endowments have improved over time.

Discrimination in wages follows a similar trend and pattern to that seen in employment. Once more, discrimination based on gender is revealed to be the main cause, by far outweighing all other factors. Importantly, its scale has increased for both regular/salaried employees and casual workers. High levels of discrimination against regular employees may result from women being given lower-level employment, being denied promotions, or being denied access to better pay scales, among other things. In fact, this demonstrates that their incomes are below what their human capital is worth. Concerningly, discrimination against the SC/ST population has increased for casual employees. Despite a general decrease in discrimination against SC/STs seeking access to high-quality work.

The most encouraging outcome in terms of pay and earnings is seen in Regular/Salaried employment in cities, where all kinds of discrimination have decreased between 2004/5 and 2019/20. In R/SE employment in rural areas, this improvement is also shown for caste and religious identities. For the SC/ST, the level of prejudice has decreased, and there is no longer any evidence of discrimination based on religion in rural regions. Since it has increased in rural areas and only slightly decreased in urban areas, gender discrimination continues to be the biggest issue in R/SE jobs. Another issue that needs serious consideration is wage discrimination in casual employment, especially for caste and gender identities. Nevertheless, both in rural and urban regions, there has been a decline in prejudice based on religion. This is largely attributable to Muslims' specialization in a few traditional skill-based professions. Due to the nationwide lockdown that completely shut down urban enterprises, the pandemic has had a significant overall impact on all the three social groups. Within a three-month period, the percentage of unemployed people increased from 15% to 50%. The minor rise in rural areas, from 10.5% to 22.2%, was more noticeable. The SC/ST and Muslims, however, had a greater increase than the general population. According to the expanded definition of unemployment (those reported as employed by weekly status but who did not work because of certain exigencies), Muslims in rural areas experienced the largest percentage increase, from 14 to 31, compared to the SC/ST group's figures of 11 to 22, and the general categories of 10 to 20. Even though there were relatively little variations between socio-religious categories, the rise in unemployment in urban areas during the pandemic was more concerning for all sectors.

Oxfam’s India Discrimination Report 2022’ shows the impact of COVID-19 on the livelihoods of marginalized communities and the following are the policy interventions suggested by the report:

• Vigorously uphold laws protecting people's rights to equitable pay and employment.
• Work to actively encourage women to enter the workforce by improving wages, upskilling, job reservations, simple return-to-work alternatives, particularly after maternity, and the possibility to work from home, whenever practicable. 
• Strive to actively confront and alter cultural, caste-based, and religious conventions about women's employment, particularly in rural areas.
• Ensure that men and women share domestic chores and childcare responsibilities more fairly.
• Adopt "living wages" in place of minimum wages, especially for all undocumented workers, and legitimize contractual, temporary, and casual work whenever possible.
• All farmers should have priority lending and credit access, regardless of their social standing. Biased lending should be punished, and credit facilities should be extended utilizing a proactive credit extension correction program.
• Ensure that pay and benefits (particularly those for education and health) are offered to people who practice minority religions, notably Muslims, on a war footing.
• Ensure that welfare targeting is precise and focused while maintaining caste-based representativeness and affirmative action (in employment and earning), notably for ST/SC.