Job Market Shift in India: A Brief Note
Women’s expanding self-employment deserves both celebration and scrutiny. Running a business can bring independence and ambition within reach. It can also become the available route when suitable paid jobs, care services or safe travel are missing. This Diwali commentary follows three explicitly imagined conversations to ask whether women’s growing contribution is translating into greater control over money and time.
At a Glance
- Self-employment covers very different arrangements, including unpaid work in a family enterprise.
- Business turnover tells us little about the owner’s earnings until costs and working time are considered.
- Entrepreneurship should remain a credible choice alongside access to decent paid employment.
- Buyers, employers and families can change the terms on which women work, starting with payments, care and ownership.
A night before Diwali
The night before Diwali, I am looking at a box of sweets and an unpaid invoice. The sweets are for me. The invoice belongs to the woman who made them.
I remember that my friend sent a photograph of 40 neatly packed boxes. The ribbons match. The labels are straight. Somewhere outside the frame are the ingredients she paid for, the delivery arrangements she made and the customer who has promised to transfer the money after the festival.
I type, “Look at you, running the show.”
She replies, “Currently running after the payment.”
I laugh. Then I wonder how much of our admiration for enterprising women comes at no cost to us.
We love the photograph of the finished order. The hours behind it are harder to frame. So are the questions about who carries the risk, who gets to rest and whether the woman doing the work has earned enough to make the next month easier.
Those questions belong in our reading of the job market shift in India. Women’s enterprise is worth celebrating. It is also worth taking seriously enough to examine the accounts.
Before we call everyone an entrepreneur
ICRIER’s October 2026 report, The Participation Paradox, estimates that India’s female workforce aged 15 and above grew from 104 million in 2017–18 to 201 million in 2025. In rural India, women working on their own account increased from 13.9 million to 56 million; unpaid family workers rose from 28.8 million to 49.3 million. These are the researchers’ estimates using PLFS data, rather than a count of newly registered businesses. (Source: ICRIER)
There is a technical wrinkle inside the celebratory headline. The official self-employment category includes own-account workers, employers and helpers in household enterprises who receive no regular salary or wages. A woman running her own venture and a woman helping in a family business without regular pay can therefore appear under the same broad heading. Unpaid household-enterprise work is distinct from unpaid domestic chores and care. (Source: MoSPI definitions)
The category recognises economic work that deserves to be counted. It does not tell us, by itself, whether each woman controls an income.
Nor do these figures prove why any particular woman became self-employed. Ambition, opportunity, necessity and household arrangements can overlap. The 2025 PLFS redesign also calls for caution when comparing survey periods. (Source: MoSPI methodological changes)
Our earlier examination of India’s working women asks who is getting ahead alongside who is being counted. The Diwali order book gives that question a particularly sharp edge.
My friend wants a bigger business. Believe her.
Let me return to the friend I was thinking about. She likes this work. She has opinions about packaging, plans for repeat customers and a formidable spreadsheet. And she does not secretly want someone to rescue her with a desk job.
“Would you go back to an office?” I ask.
“Would you ask a man that every time his business had a difficult week?”
Fair point. I put my concern down for a moment and pick up some humility.
Women’s businesses deserve room to be ambitious, ordinary, profitable, difficult and occasionally unsuccessful without becoming a verdict on whether women should run businesses. A venture can begin at home and still deserve professional terms. Its owner can prefer independence and still need childcare, finance or help enforcing a contract.
My friend’s problem is specific. She has bought supplies upfront while a larger customer treats her payment as something that can wait. That customer’s convenience is being financed by her savings.
For such a business, an agreed deposit and a payment date can be more useful than another invitation to speak about resilience. A repeat order at a sustainable price can matter more than a festive social-media feature.
It would be wonderful if we became slightly less impressed by how much women endure, and considerably more interested in whether the deal is fair.
A second income still requires a second working day
Now let me share another conversation with the domestic worker who comes to my home.
She tells me she is taking a few snack orders in her neighbourhood. She knows what people want, has calculated what she can make and has already refused an order too large for her to manage.
I begin to offer the predictable advice: she could expand. She interrupts with a practical question. “And who will do the work I already do?”
Her existing job does not disappear when I discover her entrepreneurial potential. Neither do her own household responsibilities. She may welcome the additional earnings without wanting to turn every available hour into production.
There is a particular carelessness in telling a woman to scale before asking whether she has time to sleep. Growth requires decisions about equipment, helpers, space and customers. It also requires someone to do the work she must stop doing.
That is where care work becomes an economic question. If a family wants a business to grow, its members need to take responsibility for actual tasks. School collection. Dinner. Medicine refills. The planning as well as the doing. “Tell me if you need anything” leaves the management with the same person.
In my position as her employer, I would have obligations of my own: paying her agreed wages on time, respecting agreed hours and treating leave fairly. Buying her snacks would not discharge those responsibilities. Neither would encouraging a side business justify expecting her to work around an increasingly unpredictable schedule in my home.
A woman can be enterprising without having limitless capacity. We should be able to recognise both at once.
In a village, the accounts ask a different question
For the third conversation that shaped my thoughts to write this article, I called a distant relative in a village in West Bengal. She helps run the family’s small agricultural enterprise. She knows which buyer delays payment and which inputs have become expensive. When I ask what she does, she gives me a detailed account of the work.
Then I ask how the earnings are divided.
“They go into the household,” she says.
Pooling money can be a perfectly reasonable family arrangement. The next question is whether she has an equal say in it. Can she see the accounts? Decide on an expense? Build savings she can access? Refuse an additional workload? Is the enterprise recognised as partly hers?
I do not need to invent a cruel family to make this point. Affection can coexist with arrangements nobody has properly examined. A woman may be valued, consulted and still have little independent financial security.
Calling her a helper does not settle what her contribution is worth. Calling her an entrepreneur does not establish what she owns.
The useful conversation is about how the household will recognise her labour, share decisions and provide her with financial security. That could involve agreed remuneration, a defined share of earnings or ownership arrangements appropriate to the enterprise. The details need to be worked out with her, rather than announced on her behalf.
Choice improves when there is something else to choose
These 3 women, and millions like them, should not be squeezed into one success story. Nor should they be squeezed into one story of hardship.
A business may be precisely the future a woman wants. Another woman may be selling from home because the available job pays too little after travel and childcare. A third may combine paid employment and a small venture because she needs both incomes. Each deserves better questions than whether she is sufficiently motivated.
When an employer rejects a capable applicant because she needs predictable hours, her subsequent self-employment does not make that recruitment practice irrelevant. When suitable jobs are too far away to reach safely or affordably, enterprise close to home may be a sensible response. We can respect that response while improving the alternatives.
There is no contradiction in supporting women-owned businesses and demanding more decent jobs. A healthy economy should offer both, with room to move between them.
Employers can begin with the vacancies they already have. Publish pay. Explain the hours before the interview. Assess what candidates can do. Stop treating a period of running a small business as an empty space on a CV. Managing customers, stock, expenses and deadlines is work experience; assess its relevance to the role.
For business-support organisations, the follow-up should extend beyond how many women attended training or received finance. Ask what happened six months later: whether customers returned, payments arrived, debt remained manageable, and the owner’s earnings improved.
Ask her whether she wants expansion at all. A smaller, stable enterprise may serve her better than a larger one with precarious cash flow.
This Diwali, start with what you owe
I come back to the box of sweets because this is where the large argument enters an ordinary life.
- If we order from a woman-owned business, we can agree on the price before the work begins, respect its delivery terms and pay when promised.
- If we buy on behalf of a company, we can make onboarding understandable, keep order changes realistic and assign somebody responsibility for resolving payment delays.
A festival supplier should have a fair chance of becoming a supplier in February too.
- If we share a home with the woman doing the work, we can protect her working hours with the same seriousness we give our own.
- If we employ her, we can make her existing job dependable.
- If she works in our family enterprise, we can put the conversation about money and ownership on the table.
And if you are the woman making the orders, you are allowed to count your own time in the price. You are allowed to want a salary instead. And you are allowed to build a business slowly, hire help, change direction or decide that this year you will take fewer orders and keep an evening for yourself.
Your ability to manage everything should never become everyone else’s excuse to leave it with you.
Tomorrow, we will wish one another prosperity. Tonight, there may be a very practical place to begin: the payment we have postponed, the work we have taken for granted, the woman whose contribution we admire more readily than we compensate.
Pay her. Then ask what she wants to build next.
Happy Diwali!
Editorial Note
This is a commentary using explicit conversations, not reported interviews. The employment figures come from ICRIER’s October 2026 analysis of PLFS data. Self-employment includes unpaid helpers in household enterprises and should not be read as synonymous with business ownership or independent earnings. The article’s practical recommendations and interpretation are Change in Content’s editorial position.
