Capital among most unsafe for woman workers, says NCW

The government last week notified a new law against sexual harassment at the workplace, almost a year after the fatal gang rape of Nirbhaya. If official data are to be believed, India’s capital and the cow-belt states around it are the most unsafe places for women to work in.

While labour economists have remarked about India’s sharply dipping female labour-force participation rate and the anomaly of women with more education having a higher unemployment rate than those with less or no education, insecure working and commuting environments are a key reason for many women staying away from jobs.

Sexual harassment cases escalated by female employees to the National Commission of Women, usually after other alternative recourses like complaints to the police or the employer have failed to yield a result, have risen by almost 45 per cent in 2013. This year has seen 149 complaints from women across the country, the highest in the past four years for which numbers are available.

Complaints from women employees in 2013 more than doubled in New Delhi, making the capital the most unsafe place for working women in India this year. As many as 35 cases of sexual torment at the workplace were reported in Delhi by December 5, compared to 15 in all of 2012. From neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, which recorded the highest number of cases last year at 41, 34 complaints have reached the NCW so far in 2013.

Between 2010 and 2013, the highest number of sexual harassment complaints to the NCW originated from Uttar Pradesh at 118, with Delhi coming second with 98 cases. Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana, in that order, are the other states with the most workplace harassment complaints in the same period.

By contrast, in the same period, Maharashtra and Gujarat, more developed and industrialised, have recorded just 22 and 13 sexual harassment complaints that were flagged with the NCW.

Madhu Kishwar, founder of Manushi Sangathan, an organisation working for democratic reforms, and a director at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, said the number of cases reported to the NCW doesn’t reflect greater sensitivity towards or justice for the victims of such incidents.

Many victims of sexual harassment give up hope before approaching the commission, so the NCW’s reported numbers are unreliable to gauge the actual incidence of harassment, she said.

“It is not so important how many women managed to take their complaints to the NCW as it is to know what action the commission took after receiving these reports,” Kishwar said.

The International Labour Office has expressed concerns about Indian women’s labour force participation rate (LFPR), that fell by seven percentage points from over 29 per cent in 2004-05 to 22.5 per cent in 2011-12. Rural women’s LFPR decreased from 33.3 per cent in 2004-05 to 24.8 per cent in 2011-12 while the rate dropped from 17.8 per cent to 14.6 per cent for urban women. There were 21.3 million fewer women working in India in 2009-10 compared with 2004-05, with 93 per cent of the decline taking place in rural areas. This was further exacerbated in 2011-12, when another 9.1 million rural women left the workforce, the ILO has estimated.

Haryana, with a huge employment hub in Gurgaon, had 13 sexual harassment complaints that went to the NCW this year, making it the third most unsafe state for woman workers. Rajasthan recorded 10 cases while Madhya Pradesh has reported nine complaints.