The ninth session of the FAS Young Scholars’ Online Seminar Series 2022-23 featuring Athary Janiso, PhD Scholar, BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, was held on Thursday, December 22, 2022.

Janiso spoke about his work, “Accounting Women’s Work in Rural India: Is There a Measurement Crisis?”

Janiso’s research contributes to the existing debate on low female labour force participation rate in India by exploring measurement issues related to women’s labour. To understand the problem of under-counting of women’s work, he collected and analysed responses to three distinct survey questionnaires from the same set of respondents in two villages, Katkuian in Bihar and Modegaon in Telangana. The questionaires he used were Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), Time Use Survey (2019), and Activity List. This, according to Janiso, allowed him to accurately identify the underestimation of women’s work in official labour force surveys. He observed that the economic contributions made by rural women are underrepresented in the official Indian labour force survey (Periodic Labour Force Survey, National Statistical Office) and that the survey ignores and conceals the economic activities of women who work in agriculture and animal husbandry under the guise of household duties.

The session was Chaired by Barbara Harriss-White, Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, University of Oxford. Soundarya Iyer, Assistant Professor, R V University, Bengaluru acted as the discussant.

A Q&A session, moderated by the Chair, followed the presentation.

For more details, contact us at events[at]fas[dot]org[dot]in.