Ramesh Lalwani / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0). Cropped.
India's unemployment rate eased to 5.1 per cent in the July to September quarter. The figure hides how few young women in Madhya Pradesh's cities are working at all.
The Periodic Labour Force Survey bulletin released by the statistics ministry on 10 November shows that among urban women aged 15 to 29 in the state, only 15.8 per cent were in the labour force, meaning working or looking for work. Just 11.3 per cent had work. Put simply, of every 100 young women in MP's cities, about 11 were working and four to five were looking without success.
The unemployment rate for this group was 28.5 per cent, higher than the national figure of 26.1 per cent for urban young women. For young men in MP's cities it was 18 per cent, and 62.5 per cent of them were in the labour force.
Villages tell a different story. Among rural young women in the state, 26.7 per cent were in the labour force and unemployment was 12.2 per cent, the survey shows. More than 80 per cent of working women in the state's villages are in farming. The gap does not mean cities are poorer, but it shows city jobs are not reaching young women who look for them.
MP is not the worst case. The urban young women's rate was 48.5 per cent in Telangana and 45.9 per cent in Bihar. State figures come from smaller samples and carry wider margins of error than the national number.
The survey counts anyone who worked at least an hour in the week before the interview as employed. Even by that generous measure, nine in ten young urban women in MP were not working.
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