A Gendered Analysis of Employment Characteristics in Rural and Urban Peri-Urban Areas: A comparison of the Metropolitan Areas and Rural Interiors

It is important to look at employment stated through a gendered lens, as the context of peri-urban areas is likely to impact to women differently from men. Periurban areas could provide new employment opportunities, particularly in the urban parts, and these employment opportunities are likely to be skewed in favour of men rather than women. Such differences could result from limited access to skills and formal education among women and their relatively restricted physical mobility. In the rural sector, when men leave agriculture in favour of urban activities that fetch higher wage rates, women are usually left back in agriculture with added responsibilities.

The overall unemployment situation for the three metropolitan cities selected for the study is the highest in the peri-urban areas (Fig. 4). Also, the difference between males and females are extremely high (Fig. 4). This is explained by the trend in the urban parts of the three spaces that we have taken for the analysis. It is clear from Table 4 that the male female unemployment rate differences not only

Fig. 4 Rate of unemployment in 3 selected metropolitan cities become sharper, but it peaks more noticeably for women in the peri-urban areas in comparison to both the metropolitan areas and the interior districts under consideration. It is evident, therefore, that the urban opportunities that the peri-urban regions that may have to offer cannot be utilized by the women. This could be the necessities of higher travelling distances in such areas, and possibly due to specific nature of jobs that are coming up in such areas.

The gendered pattern of work reveals quite a few important patterns. First, while the male work participation rates (WPR) expectedly does not vary irrespective of the city location, the female WPR is culturally defined and is different each of the city locations. The WPRs are highest in Mumbai followed by Kolkata and then Delhi, conforming to the to the north-south gender differences. Second, the subsidiarization of work is very high among women in rural areas as observed from the differences in the UPS and UPSS WPRs, irrespective of the city. This is an expected pattern, and women typically due to care-giving responsibilities of family, is not able to join the labour market specifically in the rural areas, but do a lot of subsidiary work, one of the common ones being tending livestock. Subsidiarization among the women in urban areas is also high in and around Kolkata.

Further, Table 4 reveals that though the peri-urban space does not provide similar opportunity for women for the most part, around the city of Delhi, women in fact get more opportunities compared to even the city core. For men in Delhi, the situation is the reverse. Women may be taken in for the low-paid jobs that men are not willing to take up. The case of both Mumbai and Kolkata are just the reverse. The WPR is the lowest in the peri-urban areas compared to the other spatial counterparts and this is particularly observable in the rural areas around Mumbai. The causes of women working could be distress-driven or due to pull factors. Conversely, women holding back from work could be due to both positive and negative reasons. Among the younger in the working age group, a low work participation most often result due to them pursuing higher education. However, lack of mobility and restrictions due to patriarchal norms may not allow women to work or work only when a ‘suitable’ opportunity comes their way that suits their restricted mobility and the work conditions are acceptable within the norms of patriarchy. Thus, while the higher WPR of both men and women in the Delhi rural peri-urban areas is presumably due to high cropping intensity and developed agriculture, in urban peri-urban Delhi, female part-time work, possibly at a lower wage rate, may be taking over the men’s jobs. So far as the quality of work is concerned, the spatial pattern for men are similar both in rural and urban areas. There is a continuum, as expected with respected to regular salaried jobs, when one moves away from the city core. In rural areas, Mumbai is an exception in the sense that the casualization is higher in the peri-urban areas. Other than this, both in rural and urban areas, casualization increases when one away from urban cores. Same is the pattern of male self-employed work in the urban areas.

The nature of work provides an insight into quality of work. Table 5 reveals some common characteristics. Unpaid family work reduces as one moves away from urban spaces. This can be understood both as wage opportunities provided

Table 5 Nature of work across spatial units in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata

Source Calculated from NSSO Employment-Unemployment Round (68th), 2011-12

by urbanization and increased monetization of the urban economies. Second, regular and salaried work shares are higher closer to urban spaces for men across the board. For women, the patterns are more irregular and city specific. Kolkata’s periurban spaces do not fare well either in rural and urban locales in this respect. In urban Delhi and both rural and urban Mumbai, there is a higher incidence of regular and salaried jobs, compared to the other two spatial units in consideration. The shares of workers in regular and salaried jobs are low in the rural areas in general. The important question to ask with respect to urban areas is whether the women are occupying the low-paid salaried jobs in the peri-urban areas promoted by the fluid environment of these spaces. In other words, a large number of households are either migrant households or those who are facing land-loss in agriculture, are persuaded to seek urban options. The concentration of economic activities, characterized by a proliferation of informalization of work, both in the formal and informal sectors, provide options for men that may pay somewhat better, but are in no way regular. Women, due to restrictions of mobility and low access to education, may be filing up the niches of the jobs that offer regularity, but pay less. This aspect is analyzed in the section on wages.

The interpretation of self-employment and causalization are highly related in rural areas, as most often they indicate the allocation of workers in agriculture as cultivators and agricultural labourers. Rural areas in Haryana around Delhi practices a profitable rice-wheat cropping pattern, endowed with good infrastructure. The men hence hold on to the land more as cultivators, whereas this is not the case close to either Mumbai or Kolkata. The corresponding percentages of casual wage workers are lower in Delhi, and higher in Mumbai and Kolkata, compared to the self-employed cultivators. In both these cases, the casualization of rural workers is explained not only by wage work in agriculture but also substantially in the nonfarm sector. The peri-urban areas of Delhi, and to a certain extent that in Kolkata, has better agricultural performances compared to the rest of the respective states. Hence, the share of self-employed cultivators is more in these spaces compared to the residual states. Some men do leave agriculture for urban opportunities in all the cities and this is indicated by higher women cultivators (self-employed in rural areas), compared to that in the residual states except in Kolkata. The incidence of casualization is higher among women in all the peri-urban spaces in rural areas. This indicates that a lot of women stay behind in agriculture in peri-urban areas and take up the men’s work arena left by them to seek rural non-farm or urban opportunities both as cultivators and agricultural labourers.

While self-employment in rural areas primarily include cultivators, the same category indicate typically indicate tiny entrepreneurs in urban areas characterized by high amount of vulnerability. In the urban peri-urban spaces, incidence of women’s participation in self-employed options, probably many of them home- based, is higher compared to that in the urban core and residual states. This pattern is not seen for men, whose engagement in self-employment in urban areas is the highest in the residual states, for the most part.