Article

Estimating the Number and Economic Contribution of Home-based Garment Producers in Ahmedabad, India

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Abstract

Home-based producers are some of the most invisible workers in the unorganised sector. In many industries, including garment making, they comprise a sizeable proportion of the workforce. Because these producers work within the home, often on activities closely related to household production for consumption, they are easily missed in labour force estimates. Added to this problem is the fact that many home-based producers are women and women have traditionally been an under-counted group within labour force statistics. The paper aims to make visible the number and contribution of male and female home-based garment producers in Ahmedabad, illustrating any deficiencies in official statistics. It also highlights the aggregate contribution made as well as differences by gender and recommends ways to improve counts of home-based producers and strategies to increase the contribution of female home-based garment producers in Ahmedabad.

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... Due to generic problems in enumerating women workers and specific problems in enumerating home-based workers, it is particularly difficult to estimate the number of home-based garment workers. One recent and careful estimation, undertaken in the late-1990s, puts the number of home-based garment workers as 30,000 (Kantor 1999). However, this estimate has not been updated since them. ...
... Paula Kantor, using a one-stage stratified cluster sample, conducted a similar study in Ahmedabad and estimated a total of 44,307 home-based garment enterprises, of which 75 per cent were female. This study found more than three times the number of home-based women producers in the garment sector than those counted by the Census as working in household industry plus marginal workers, even though garments is only one of many household-based enterprises (Kantor 2001). ...
Article
In the Indian context, norms of female seclusion limit women's mobility in the public sphere, constraining their economic opportunities by limiting their choices of work location and their ability to interact in markets. However, women do not experience the constraints of female seclusion homogeneously. This article examines the effect of variation in mobility levels on the economic outcomes for female home-based garment producers in Ahmedabad, India, to determine if those who are more mobile are more economically successful. It does this using two-stage least squares estimation techniques to represent the endogeneity of mobility levels. The results show that for this group, mobility has no significant effect on economic outcomes, probably reflecting characteristics of the garment sector in the research site that reduce the potential returns of mobility. Regardless of this lack of significant instrumental effect, a case is made for increasing women's freedom of movement in order to prepare them to take advantage of future opportunities within the sector.
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This article examines the contribution of a sectoral approach to understanding gender constraints on economic success in the informal sector, using the example of self-employed women in home-based garment production in Ahmedabad, India. The author assesses whether all the constraints laid out in the gender and microenterprise development literature affect women in this sector and, if not, suggests how theory on gender inequality in the microenterprise sector needs to be rethought to address variation by sector. Constraints are disaggregated into women intensive, women exclusive, and sector specific. The results show that the women-exclusive constraints all hold within this sector, that there is variation among the women-intensive constraints in their differential gender effect, and that some sector-specific constraints tend to be more intense for women relative to men. The latter two results suggest that variation by economic activity must be accounted for in understanding the sources and extent of gender inequality in economic outcomes.
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