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Equal pay for equal work is one of the cornerstones of the gender equality movement the world over.
But Labour Bureau data show there has been little progress in terms of parity of salaries for men and women for equivalent work in India.
Even more alarming is the fact that even though wage disparities have always existed in rural parts of the country, in some spheres of activity, the divide has widened.
So while men were paid 70 per cent higher wages than women for ploughing work at the end of 2004-05, the difference rose to 80.4 per cent in end-March 2012 and stood at 93.6 per cent at the start of 2013-14.
And while men were paid 75 per cent more than women for well-digging work in March 2005, the difference stood at 80 per cent in the current financial year.
The data indicate that daily wage disparities have by and large remained constant since 1999, though they did rise in the early 2000s.
As of 2013, the discrimination in wages paid to women tends to be higher in physically intensive activities (such as ploughing and well-digging), but lower in the case of work such as sowing and harvesting.
Outside the agricultural sphere, it appears that gender stereotypes won out once again, if one considers unskilled non-agricultural work.
Child labour
The difference in daily wages for unskilled non-agricultural work narrowed marginally, from 34 per cent in 2005 to 32 per cent in April 2013. But while it was an improvement, the gap was even narrower at the start of the 2012-13 financial year.
The publication of daily wage data for children indicates this section continues to be unscrupulously exploited for unskilled tasks.
The attraction of child labour can be gauged by the fact that compared to an average daily wage of Rs 179 for an unskilled male worker and Rs 135 for a female, children are paid as little as Rs 92 per day for equivalent unskilled work, the Labour Bureau data suggests.
The gender disparity is exacerbated by the lower earnings of the rural population of the country in comparison to workers in the industrial sector, who earn nearly double the average wage of rural workers.
>arvind.jayaram@thehindu.co.in
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