Women as marginal workers in informal mining and quarrying, India: a preliminary analysis

This paper presents an analysis of 2001 Indian Census data at the state level on women workers in the mining and quarrying (M&Q) sector. In the absence of official data on informal M&Q, the paper uses the census category of 'marginal workers' as a rough indicator of informal employment within this industrial category. The paper has two stages of analysis: first, it presents a state-by-state description of employment of women as main and marginal workers in key minerals; it then correlates income and other social indicators to the proportion of women marginal workers in different mineral categories in order to explore the connections between income, poverty/economic ill-being, caste and other social factors and informal M&Q. It concludes that at the state level, correlations are difficult to draw, and that there is need for further elaborate data for analysis.