Road to empowerment: Rural roads programme and women's outcomes

Lack of spatial mobility is recognised as a critical constraint on women's socioeconomic participation. This article presents findings from a study examining the impact of India’s rural roads programme, on women’s outcomes. While the construction of all-weather roads alleviates women’s mobility restrictions and improves social norms and female education, there is limited effect on female employment – with men benefitting more in this regard instead.

Globally, women have long experienced poor socioeconomic outcomes. With India representing approximately 17% of the world's female population, the country serves as a significant case study. As per the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) conducted in 2019-20, female labour force participation (FLFP) stands at a mere 30% – one of the lowest globally – and has been declining since the past few decades. Additionally, as per the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), 2011-12, more than 30% of women report facing mobility restrictions. Physical mobility constraints are recognised as a critical barrier limiting women's socioeconomic participation (Field and Vyborny 2022, Bankar et al. 2018, Goel 2023). Societies where women find it difficult to freely travel from one place to the other often have more stringent gender norms and lower FLFP rates. In recent research (Nandwani and Roychowdhury 2024), we examine the impact of a transportation infrastructure policy, that invested in road infrastructure in rural India, on women’s autonomy and empowerment.

Rural roads and women’s outcomes

Rural roads were constructed as part of the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna (PMGSY) – a flagship rural roads construction programme of the Government of India. Launched in 2000, PMGSY aimed to connect previously unconnected villages with a population exceeding 500, to the nearest market centre through the construction of all-weather roads. The programme's implementation was phased, prioritising larger villages based on population size: those with over 1000 residents were to be connected first, followed by villages with a population of 500 or more. Figures 1 and 2 below show the spatial distribution of PMGSY roads up to 2004 and 2010, respectively.

Figure 1. Rural population exposed to PMGSY road up to 2004

Figure 2. Rural population exposed to PMGSY road up to 2010

Rural women face significant disadvantages due to poor transportation infrastructure, limited economic and educational prospects, and entrenched gender norms. The construction of rural paved roads is expected to benefit them due to several reasons. Paved roads enable improved transportation facilities and reduced travel costs and hence, can facilitate easier travel for women within and beyond their villages. In many developing countries, women often have to travel long distance to fetch water and firewood. Faster travel times can allow them to allocate more time to productive employment activities. Additionally, improved connectivity to market towns can provide access to diverse educational and employment opportunities beyond agriculture. Increased interaction with people from outside their village and visits to market towns can also foster cultural integration and challenge societal perceptions about the conventional roles of women.

Despite these potential benefits, the actual impact may be constrained by prevailing social norms. Deeply ingrained societal attitudes regarding female mobility could limit the effectiveness of physical infrastructure investments in enhancing women's autonomy. Thus, the potential impact of rural roads construction on women outcomes is a priori unclear.

Indicators of empowerment and data sources

We employ multiple socioeconomic outcomes to capture women's empowerment in a comprehensive way. This decision stems from influential studies that define women's empowerment as the process through which individuals, who have historically been denied the ability to make choices, voice opinions, and exert influence both personally and in broader community contexts, acquire these capabilities (Kabeer 1999). Clearly, women’s empowerment is not a single-dimensional phenomenon (Moghadam 1996, Kabeer 1999, Janssens 2010) and extends beyond women’s economic position in terms of work, income, education, and assets, to encompass other social and political dimensions (Kabeer, Mahmud and Tasneem 2011, Golla et al. 2011).

Specifically, we categorise variables capturing women’s empowerment into five main groups: (i) restrictions on female mobility, (ii) norms regarding domestic violence, (iii) intra-household agency, (iv) financial autonomy, and (v) other miscellaneous gender norms/outcomes (for example, practice of purdah¹).

We use two large datasets to get information on these outcomes: IHDS and National Sample Survey (NSS). IHDS is a nationally representative, multi-topic panel household survey conducted by National Council of Applied Economics Research (NCAER). The first wave of IHDS was conducted in 2004-05 followed by the next wave in 2011-12, and each wave surveyed close to 40,000 households. IHDS includes a dedicated module specifically for women, administered to one randomly selected married female above the age of 15 in each household. This module includes topics such as female mobility, perceptions of domestic violence, reproductive health, and education – providing a comprehensive set of indicators related to female autonomy. NSS is a large nationally representative household survey conducted by Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, that captures detailed information on employment status and education background of surveyed household members. For our analysis, we use the NSS rounds conducted in 2004-05 and 2011-12. Note that unlike IHDS, NSS is not a ‘panel’ dataset and does not necessarily survey the same households over survey rounds.

We use administrative data on rural roads constructed under the PMGSY programme. The data have been made publicly available by the government and is available on the Online Management Monitoring System (OMMS). The PMGSY data provide village-level information on the construction of roads. In contrast, the IHDS and NSS lack village-level identifiers and instead use districts as their smallest geographic unit. Therefore, we aggregate the PMGSY data at the district level and construct the percentage of population in a district that is exposed to a paved rural road for our sample period. We merge this district-level road exposure information with the IHDS and NSS.

Empirical analysis and findings

We use the variation created by the programme rule in exposure of population to new rural roads, to identify the impact of PMGSY on women’s empowerment from 2000 to 2011. Since exposure of population to rural roads is a function of distribution of sizes of unconnected villages in a district, it is likely to be ‘exogenous’ to women's outcomes. Thus, leveraging the panel structure of the IHDS data, we employ two-way fixed effects (women fixed effects along with year fixed effects)² to capture changes in individual exposure to paved roads over time.

Our empirical results suggest that rural roads construction leads to improvement in most indicators of women’s empowerment. An increase in the percentage of the population exposed to paved roads reduces mobility restrictions faced by women, as they are less likely to report needing permission to travel outside their homes. Exposure to paved roads also improves norms around domestic violence, reducing the likelihood of women reporting that domestic violence is common in their community. Further, women report having improved agency and reduced prevalence of patriarchal norms with increase in exposure to paved roads. However, rural roads construction does not have any impact on women's financial autonomy in terms of bank account ownership or house ownership/rental.

Turning to the impact on education, we find that road exposure increases the likelihood of females being enrolled in education institutes. However, despite improvements in education, there is no corresponding increase in female employment. Moreover, we document that while the programme positively affects the likelihood of men being employed, it does not have a significant impact on female employment rates.

Our findings are robust to various potential confounding factors, including initial provision of public goods at district and village levels, as well as the presence of other welfare programmes that may disproportionately benefit rural women.

Our results suggest that while infrastructure improvement of roads construction type yield significant benefits in terms of improved gender norms and increasing human capital investment among females, they do not lead to an improvement in FLFP. The observed lack of impact on female employment could be because of increased male employment (and consequently male income) due to PMGSY. A strand of recent literature has documented negative effects of increase in income of males on female employment due to a ‘positive income effect’ (Mehrotra and Parida 2017, Mehrotra and Sinha 2017). Furthermore, since the programme does not improve employment outcomes for females, the absence of positive effects on female financial autonomy is unsurprising.

Although our ‘reduced form’ analysis effectively demonstrates the impact of road construction on women's empowerment, the lack of detailed data prevents us from thoroughly examining the underlying mechanisms that drive the improvement in gender norms without influencing employment outcomes. Nevertheless, this finding speaks to the existing work that has highlighted that improving FLFP in India has proven very challenging over the past decades (Afridi, Dinkelman and Mahajan 2018) and requires not just improvement in norms but also changes in the nature of jobs (see Deshpande and Singh (2021) for this discussion).

Conclusion and discussion

Mobility restrictions caused by infrastructure inadequacies have been shown to be particularly harmful for the conduct of economic activities. Females, who have historically faced constraints to their participation in employment activities and decision-making, are particularly at a disadvantage due to spatial isolation. Our findings suggest that easing mobility restrictions for women through rural roads infrastructure development can improve the lives of women on many accounts. Women experience lower restrictions on their movement outside home, improved norms related to domestic violence, have increased decision-making power within the household, and higher likelihood of attending education institutions.

This study provides valuable policy insights, particularly for other developing countries, as existing research has predominantly focused on micro-interventions promoting women's use of infrastructure and their outcomes (Small and van der Meulen Rodgers 2023), whereas our study evaluates a government-introduced, large-scale roads investment programme in a non-experimental setting. These findings are particularly relevant in the context of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically SDG 5, which aims to achieve gender equality by 2030, highlighting the potential of infrastructure development in addressing gender disparities.

Notes:

Purdah is a practice of secluding women from public observation through face coverings. The prevalence of purdah is an indicator of the gender norms around women's presence in public spaces.
Women fixed effects control for time-invariant individual characteristics ensuring changes in outcomes are driven by road exposure over time. Year fixed effects account for time-varying factors affecting all women, such as national policies or economic shocks. Together, this approach isolates the relationship between changes in road access and women’s outcomes by eliminating confounding influences, allowing us to reliably estimate the impact of PMGSY on women’s empowerment.