Union Labour Minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Wednesday suggested that the definition of jobs be revised to include women working within the household as well as self-employed persons.

Mandaviya, commenting on statistics about the low participation of women in the workforce, questioned why a woman is “considered employed only when she works in someone else’s home and not her own”. He further argued that several women work within the household by taking care of cattle at home and working on farms, and thus must be counted as self-employed persons.

The minister said that there was a need for a policy intervention to change the definition of employment.

Mandaviya was addressing a conference on “Future of Jobs-Shaping Tomorrow's Workforce”, jointly organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry and the Ministry of Labour and Employment.

The Union minister had made a similar suggestion in December as well, when he said that the country needed to redefine a “job” to include self-employed individuals, and to link skill development with industry requirements.

“India’s youth is its strength and we need to tweak the definition of job to include even the self-employed as per our requirement,” Mandaviya had said, according to the Economic Times.

Economists have previously told Scroll that the poor health of the informal sector in recent years is likely to have pushed millions of Indians towards self-employment, jobs in the gig sector, or forced them to go back to agriculture. This results in a deterioration of job quality in terms of wages, they said.

On July 9, credit markets rating agency India Ratings released a report saying that 63 lakh informal sector enterprises shut down in the country, resulting in 1.6 crore jobs lost between the financial years 2015-’16 and 2022-’23.

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