A new law, which gives women better maternity benefits and encourages them to stay in their jobs, is having the opposite effect, a recent survey has shown.
The law entitles women working in the organised sector to 26 weeks paid maternity leaves, compared to 12 weeks in the past. This makes India the third country after Canada and Norway to have such a progressive law for women.
But this hasn't gone down well with smaller businesses and start-ups, which will be reluctant to hire women, says the survey conducted by TeamLease Services, a staffing and human resources company.
The survey, conducted among 300 employers, shows around 11 lakh to 18 lakh women are set to lose jobs in the current financial year across 10 sectors including information technology and IT-enabled services, manufacturing, retail, banking and financial services, aviation, education, e-commerce and tourism.
If all sectors are taken into account, the job loss is estimated to be around a staggering 1 crore to 1.2 crore.
This is a double whammy for working women, whose share of the workforce has shrunk to 24 percent in 2016 from 36 percent a decade earlier.
According to McKinsey and Co. if more women start working, the country's GDP would grow by $700 billion by 2025.
According to a World Bank estimate, around 2 crore women left jobs in the 2004-2012 period due to various reasons, the main being to take care of children and older family members.
"Reforms like these elsewhere in the world are complemented with tax concessions, which are missing here," K. Sudarshan, managing partner for India at executive search firm EMA Partners International, told Bloomberg.
He added that small to medium-sized businesses generally have less staff and if two out of five women employees in higher positions go on maternity leave, the company will come to a standstill.
