Emerging Challenges of Rural Labour Market: Insights from Indian Villages

Abstract This article has examined the labour market behaviour of rural India, with the objective to assess the changes taking place in the structure of the workforce and attempts to identify the factors affecting the changes in rural labour supply. In particular, this article tries to address the inconsistency between absolute declines in labour force, particularly rural females at national level, with the micro-level evidences of feminisation in farm work through the estimation of labour supply function. Empirical findings indicate an increasing trend in female participation, particularly aged in rural India. The significant positive association of occupation dummy with male labour supply and negative association with female labour supply, in one way, explains the greater participation of male workers in non-farm work and higher concentration of females in farm activities. Therefore, attention needs to be paid to promote initiatives such as youth entrepreneurship in agriculture to retain youth in farming, encourage innovations in designing appropriate location-specific machineries and tools which are female-friendly, and also organise capacity-building programmes for skill augmentation focusing rural female workers. JEL: J21, J43, J42, J16