In the context of growing gender inequalities and the consequential adverse impacts on the well-being of the society, gender issues have emerged at the centre stage of development planning in most countries including India.
The formulation of specific policies and programmes to address such issues effectively has to be, however, based on reliable and timely statistics on various aspects of gender inequalities. A major data gap in this regard is non-availability of reliable measurement of economic contribution of women.
Several social scientists even consider that the very definition and instruments used for collecting data on economic activities in India are inadequate to identify and measure the real contribution of women.
Though these issues are of considerable significance to the statistical system of the country, the focus of this paper is on estimating the contribution of women to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country based on available data sets, except for highlighting the likely magnitude of underestimation at the end.