Story of the quiet surge

India’s demographic transition is a well-known and well-studied phenomenon. It refers to the country’s youthful bulge, which is expanding faster than the overall population. Economists like to present it as a challenge: one million new jobs needed every month, for the next 100 months. The obverse of this is a dream opportunity: this is the section of India’s population that is of working age, is spending, saving, investing and paying taxes. It will exceed the non-workers by a big margin. India will not have the ageing problem that besets Western economies and even China and Japan. Anirudha Dutta’s book Half a Billion Rising is about one half of this promising demography, i.e., the women of India.

When the unexpectedly victorious and newly-appointed prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, was asked, “Why are half of your cabinet members women,” he replied, “Because it’s 2015.” This will surely become the quote of the year. Also, this year saw Malala get a Nobel Prize for her courage to stand up against murderous patriarchy. All she wanted to do was to go to school. Even though it is 2015, in India, there are women who are trapped in circumstances that are decades, if not centuries old.

Forty-seven per cent of girls are getting married before they turn 18. In many districts, the female literacy rate is less than 25% (and even that is a diluted definition). In contrast, women are heading more than 50% of India’s banking industry. Isro’s historic Mars Mission had a core backbone of women engineers and scientists. Dutta’s book is a cocktail of macro statistics of these kinds, mixed with anecdotal ground-level stories of the fairer sex. The book has 11 chapters that chronicle the silent revolution that is taking place in our midst.  This is one half of the so-called demographic dividend that India has been promised.

If women can truly realise their full productive potential in the economy, if their workforce participation becomes equal to men, then India’s GDP will go up immensely. An IIT engineer and a leading equity analyst in the financial sector, Dutta says that this is the once-in-a-lifetime change that we are seeing today. His book is partly a labour of love, which was born out of 22,000 km of journeys across the hinterland, city slums, schools and even corporate boardrooms.

The hopes and aspirations documented in this book do not blank out the dark reality of child marriage, khap panchayats, female foeticide, rape and violence, which also exist. But after reading Dutta’s book, you cannot escape the feeling that the net direction is positive. The gains are tangible. The stories of empowerment are real. You might even recognise some of these women among your co-workers. This publication will give you a glimpse into their lives. It’s an inspiring book.