Women's labour force participation rate in India is a contentious statistics because mainstream economists claim it is dismally low, while feminist scholars argue that women's work is not properly counted or enumerated. We also believe that the latter is true: women work at home, outside in formal and informal employment, and are primarily responsible for home-based work like animal husbandry or weaving or pottery or food production.

Here is Devkali, a 50 year old Dalit woman engaged in cutting chaff for her animals, operating a chaff cutter that requires two people. Her husband is helping her today, but it is not often that the male members of the family help out with home-based work.

Devkali's day starts as early as 3 am. She will do housework and then feed their animals. Then she heads out for work - casual labour in farms or in the town. At the end of the day, she walks to the fields where she cuts fodder for her animals which she will later process at home. She return home to housework and cutting the fodder on her machine to feed the animals the next day. Devkali is one of few Dalit women whose household has a chaff cutter machine. Most Dalit women use a handmade implement called 'gadasa' that weighs 3 kilos and with which it takes ages to cut the chaff. Devkali is compensated with wages only for one part of the day's work and only that part of the day is counted as economically productive activity in our measurements.

This means that we have only seen and counted one-third of the work done by Devkali, the rest is not deemed as work or it is invisible to us! Could this be a reason for the low labour force participation rates for women in India, because we don't count, we don't see, and we don't compensate all the work done by women?

The photos show Devkali at work on the chaff cutting machine and Meera with a handmade chaff cutter.