Behind the Chief Minister’s words lie a job reservation, a budget pillar and rising labour numbers; the real test now is whether that reach extends to the hills
By Purna Chandra Jena
Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said this week, once again, that women’s empowerment remains a top priority. Unlike many such claims, this one carries a paper trail: a 30 per cent horizontal reservation for women in state recruitment, a Rs 1.11 lakh crore budget naming women one of four pillars of its GYAN model, and a steady run of scheme announcements through 2026. Governments often say women matter and stop at sentiment. Uttarakhand’s own data suggests it has gone further; the numbers are worth laying out before judging whether the commitment is real.
First, the participation data lends real, if less dramatic, support. NITI Aayog’s own reading of PLFS data shows Uttarakhand’s female LFPR had already converged close to the national average by 2022-23, even as the national female LFPR itself climbed from 37.0 per cent that year to 41.7 per cent in 2023-24. On the youth side, where the state does get its own published number, Uttarakhand’s overall youth LFPR (15-29, both sexes) rose from 43.7 to 49 per cent, ahead of the national 46.5 per cent, a labour market moving the right way even where PLFS does not yet publish a female-only cut.
Second, this is not a one-year blip; it sits on institutional plumbing built over two decades. Uttarakhand was among the first states, with Bihar and Chhattisgarh, to legislate 50 per cent reservation for women in Panchayati Raj institutions, and today records the highest share of elected women in PRIs of any state, over 56 per cent against a national average of 45.6 per cent. On top of that political base, over 69,000 self-help groups, carrying more than 5 lakh women members, are federated into nearly 8,000 village organisations under the Rural Livelihoods Mission, the delivery backbone through which a scheme like Lakhpati Didi reaches a household in Pauri or Pithoragarh.
Third, the 2026 announcements read as compounding policy, not one-off symbolism: the self-employment loan ceiling raised from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 2.5 lakh, free Roadways travel for women above 60, pink e-buses in Dehradun, and high-tech public toilets planned at markets and tourist sites. None is transformative alone, but stacked on the reservation numbers and the SHG network, they show a government adding instruments, not just speeches, which is what “top priority” ought to mean in budget language.
Fourth, the harder test is whether this reach extends to the hills, where feminisation of agriculture is a demographic fact, not a policy outcome. Roughly 3.5 lakh people left Uttarakhand’s Census districts between 2001 and 2011, and over 700 more villages have been abandoned since, pushing the state’s “ghost village” count past 1,700. Fieldwork in Pauri Garhwal and Almora finds that close to half of non-migrant women are already working the terraced fields their husbands left behind, labour that the PLFS tends to undercount as unpaid household work rather than employment.
Fifth, two older indicators have not moved at the same pace and deserve equal candour. Census 2011 recorded a child sex ratio of 890, down from 908 in 2001, and a female literacy rate of 70 per cent against 87.4 per cent for men, a 17-point gap that widens further in rural districts. No livelihood scheme fixes either quickly; both need the same decade-long urgency in schooling and enforcement that the state has brought to its jobs push.
Sixth, the newest data round is a caution, not a reversal. From January 2025, PLFS moved to a calendar-year cycle with a nearly tripled sample, breaking strict comparability with the July-June series; on this new basis Uttarakhand’s overall LFPR (15+) reads 56.3 per cent and WPR 53.4 per cent, both softer than the 2023-24 peak, with a state-level female breakdown yet to be published. What the redesign does confirm is job quality: regular salaried work at 29.3 per cent of state employment, well above the national 23.6 per cent, meaning the jobs behind these numbers, women’s included, are more often durable than casual.
Put together, the evidence supports the Chief Minister’s claim more than it undermines it: PRI reservation, budget, SHG network and rising participation are line items, not slogans. The unfinished business is not sincerity but reach, into the hill households where migration, not policy, still decides how much of a woman’s work gets seen and paid for. That is the fair test to hold this government to next.
(The writer is an Economic Adviser, Advisory Support Group, Chief Minister’s Office, Government of Uttarakhand, and Consultant with Chief Policy and Strategy Advisors, New Delhi. Views are personal.)
