India is unfavourably ranked 149 among 153 nations in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index of 2020. This index measures criteria related to Maternal mortality rates, deaths per 100,000 live births, Prevalence of gender violence in lifetime, among other factors.

Only about 27% Indian women are currently in the labour force. Among G-20 countries, only Saudi Arabia is worse off, IndiaSpend reported on April 9, 2016. Within South Asia in 2013, India had the lowest rate of female employment after Pakistan.

According to the NFHS 2015-16 data available only about 30 per cent of women who undergo or experience some form of domestic violence and sexual abuse from their spouses report the matter to the police. Shockingly, almost 75% did not seek help from anyone.

In 2018, on an average around 63 housewives died by suicide, making up 17.1 per cent of all the suicides. Since 2001, more than 20,000 housewives have committed suicide every year in India. This is second only to daily wage earners — who killed themselves because of unemployment, the agrarian crisis, and the slow growth of the unorganised sector, putting them at risk of poverty and depression. In fact, in 2016, India contributed to over one-third of overall suicides by women (36.3 per cent) in the world.

India’s urban areas have a more unfavourable sex ratio. For instance, according to the NFHS data 2015-16, the percentage of Females between the ages of 0-6 years to Males is 899: 1000 in urban areas. The same is between 923 females to 1000 males in rural areas.

As a part of a recent study published in Lancet Global Health, it was found that about 2 lakh girls under the age of five die each year because of their gender- in part due to unwanted child-bearing and neglect. The majority of India’s districts, about 90% and among 29 of the states and union territories, according to the study, whose conclusions its authors arrived at data from the 2011 Census.

Made to focus on domestic chores, more than one in four girls got married before the age of 18 which presents almost 26.8 per cent of the population. The girl’s status after marriage remained poor–one in two non-pregnant women was anaemic (53.2%), one in four was underweight (22.9%) and one in three married women faced spousal violence (31.1%), showed NFHS-4.

While the reporting of rape cases increased after 2012, there has been little change in the conviction rates for crimes against women, suggesting that policing and other changes did not materially affect outcomes beyond reporting. In fact, the conviction rate for rape crimes has continued to decline since 2007 and has reached a historic low of 18.9 percent in 2016.