Something Deeply Disturbing is Happening in India and Nobody Talks About It

Something Deeply Disturbing is Happening in India and Nobody Talks About It - Picture the nine o'clock rush outside any business park in Gurugram or Bengaluru. Thousands of people crossing the road toward the glass towers, badges out, coffee in hand. It looks, from a distance, like a country going to work. Stand there for ten minutes and count, and the picture changes. For roughly every one woman crossing that road, three men walk past her. Nobody in that crowd notices the ratio. That's the whole problem in one image — the absence only becomes visible once someone stops to count. That is not an impression. It is the shape of the actual number. India's own labour survey puts fewer than 50 million women inside the urban workforce, in cities that hold close to 500 million people. Zoom out further and it gets stranger. Independent analysis of that same government survey puts around 300 million Indian women of working age outside the paid workforce entirely — more people than live in the United States, more than twice the population of Brazil. Against them stand roughly 120 million working-age men in the same position, less than half as many.