That the garment industry - or the 'manufacture of wearing apparel' as it is quaintly called in labour statistics - is a big part of the Indian growth story is fairly well known. We know that this is an area of competition with Bangladesh and Viet Nam in the export market, for example, and we know that it's a big part of the female manufacturing workforce story within India. Yet, I was struck by just how central it is to any gains at all for women in India's manufacturing workforce.
Although the number of manufacturing jobs in India has grown modestly, the share of women in India's manufacturing workforce has grown substantially over the last twenty years. "In 2000, under a quarter of manufacturing workers in India were women; now they make up more than a third," my colleague Nileena Suresh writes in her piece for us on women in manufacturing. A very large part - much larger than I had pictured - of what women in manufacturing in India do is explained by the manufacture of apparel alone, Nileena finds.
It's not just that the share of women in manufacturing who are in the apparel sector grew - it's also that virtually all of the growth in manufacturing jobs for women was in apparel manufacturing alone.
This has at least two important implications; as my colleagues Ishan Deodhar and Abhishek Waghmare find, the apparel industry is starkly geographically concentrated within India. Secondly, as they find, it is not among the ten manufacturing sectors that produce the most economic value add.
There is no doubt that the growing entry of women into the manufacturing workforce is a big shift for the country with possible ramifications for the economy and society. But just how much of that shift is on account of relatively low-value apparel manufacturing alone was something of an eye-opener to me.
