Rethinking Skilling for India’s Women
–Ms. Subhashree Pati–
India’s female labour force participation rate has hovered around 32 to 33 percent for several years now, against roughly 77 percent for men, placing the country among the lowest performers on this indicator relative to its economic peers.
A recent NITI Aayog analysis added useful granularity to this headline figure, finding that 71 percent of women are either informally employed or fall into the NEET category, meaning not in education, employment, or training, with only about 3 percent in formal jobs. Deloitte’s Women at Work research points to a related structural pressure, namely the disproportionate burden of unpaid care work and safety considerations that shape whether women can sustain formal employment once they enter it. Sector level data on the blue and grey collar workforce similarly puts women’s representation at around 19 percent, with visible gaps in wages, safety, and career progression.
Taken together, these findings suggest that women’s low participation in India’s formal workforce is not, at its core, a skills deficit. The scale of India’s skilling investment over the past decade, spanning vocational training, digital literacy, and sector specific certification programs, has reached millions of women.
The persistent question is one of conversion, that is, whether acquired skills translate into sustained, formal economic participation. From a policy design standpoint, this reframes the challenge considerably. It is less about expanding the volume of training delivered and more about examining whether the architecture of delivery, in terms of scheduling, geographic access, and information flow, is calibrated to the constraints most women actually face.
Consider scheduling design first. The dominant training model in India remains a fixed, full day format, historically inherited from industrial training institute structures built for a different demographic profile. This format implicitly assumes an uninterrupted block of time that does not compete with other responsibilities. For a large proportion of women, particularly those managing caregiving alongside economic activity, this assumption does not hold. Survey data cited in the NITI Aayog report found that 78 percent of women prefer part-time formats that accommodate caregiving responsibilities, with 68 percent expressing an active preference for part time over full-time delivery. This is not a marginal preference requiring a bespoke track. It represents the preference of a clear majority within the target population, and suggests that modular, stackable training design, rather than a fixed curriculum block, may yield materially better conversion outcomes without requiring additional financial outlay.
A second design variable concerns geographic placement of training infrastructure. Facility location decisions in most public systems are driven by land availability and administrative convenience rather than proximity to end users. For women specifically, proximity functions as a binding constraint rather than a mere preference, shaped by local transport availability, route safety, and household level mobility norms. The same survey found that 75 percent of women preferred training within a five kilometres radius of home, a notably precise and actionable threshold for infrastructure planning. This points toward a delivery model that leverages existing grassroot institutions, such as Self-Help Groups (SHGs), anganwadi networks, and community resource centres, as last mile delivery points, rather than relying solely on centralised training institutes that require longer commutes.
The third variable is information asymmetry at the point of outreach. Conventional outreach channels, including public notices, SMS campaigns, and digital advertising, tend to be effective for populations with unconstrained access to information. For a segment of women, however, seeking information about training opportunities carries a social cost that these channels do not account for.
The NITI Aayog report illustrates this through the case of a woman in peri urban Vijayawada who remained unaware of nearby programs partly because inquiring was perceived as socially conspicuous. This suggests a stronger role for trusted intermediary networks, including women led Self Help Groups (SHGs) and peer collectives that already operate at the grassroot level, as primary information conduits, given their higher credibility and lower social friction relative to formal outreach mechanisms.
From a policy standpoint, the implication is not that India’s skilling architecture requires wholesale restructuring, but that a targeted recalibration of scheduling, geographic delivery, and outreach design, informed by existing behavioural data, could substantially improve conversion from training to formal employment. The underlying indicators, whether the 32 percent labour force participation rate, the 71 percent informal or NEET figure, or the 19 percent representation in blue and grey collar roles, should be read as diagnostic rather than conclusive. They point toward a workforce that has already demonstrated willingness to train and work, and toward a system where the remaining gains lie in aligning delivery design with the lived realities of the population it seeks to serve.
(Subhashree Pati works with the National Council for Vocational Education and Training (NCVET), Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, and has previously worked with NITI Aayog.)
(UPDATED ON 16TH SEPTEMBER 2026)
