COVID likely to lock India’s women out of job market for years

Azim Premji University report finds 47 percent of women who lost jobs last year have been made permanently redundant.

Savitri Devi has been searching for work since she lost her job at a garment factory in India’s capital New Delhi, along with half her coworkers, when sales plummeted at the start of the coronavirus pandemic last year. The 44-year-old has tried her luck repeatedly – and unsuccessfully – near her home in Okhla, an industrial hub with thousands of small factories and workshops, where there was previously plenty of unskilled jobs for women. “I am ready to take a salary cut but there is no work,” Devi said outside her one-room home in a slum of about 100 families, just a few kilometres away from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office.