Flex Work Research Centre

This paper considers how India’s economic liberalization under the New Economic Policy (NEP) has affected its labour policies designed to protect women in precarious work. Particular attention is paid to the negative influence the NEP has had on women’s empowerment schemes from the 1990s onwards. Although India’s GDP has increased exponentially from 267 billion USD in 1991 to 691 billion USD in 2004, women continue to have significantly higher levels of unemployment, illiteracy, and poverty than men. However, it is not solely the NEP that has limited women’s protection in the workplace but also the entrenched hierarchical power relations within India’s “soft state.”