Gendered Human Capital Misallocation in India: Education, Labour Market Barriers, and Policy Failure

Authors: Simran Sinha; Beaulah Anton; Priyansi; Rezaa Sharma

Abstract:

India has made significant progress in expanding female education, yet women’s labour market outcomes remain disproportionately poor. This study reframes this paradox as an issue of gendered human capital misallocation, rather than a deficit in skill formation. It examines how the gendered labour market constraints impede the educated women from productive employment, leading to underutilisation of skills and decreased economic efficiency.

Utilising a qualitative-descriptive approach and secondary data from multiple databases, this paper examines unemployment, occupational segregation, unpaid care work, and wage disparities between educated women and their male counterparts. The findings show a persistent education-employment paradox: increased female education correlates with high unemployment, informalisation, and labour force withdrawal. These patterns are driven by demand-side discrimination, inflexible work arrangements, safety and challenges in mobility, and unequal distribution of care responsibilities. The analysis argues that government policies have largely prioritised educational expansion without addressing labour market absorption, therefore sustaining gendered inefficiencies. Addressing this inefficient allocation is what makes it important for optimal human capital utilisation and for inclusive economic growth.

Keywords:
Human Capital, Female labour, Labour market segmentation, Gender wage gap, public policy, employment, Human capital misallocation

Articles, International Relations

Diaspora Kitchens and Diplomacy: Indian Restaurants as Informal Soft Power Sites Abroad

Institute For Policy Research & Governance / 27/02/2026

Authors: Prapti Das; Diya Jain; Aditi Shree

ABSTRACT

Indian diaspora restaurants increasingly serve as unrecognised informal venues of cultural diplomacy, mediating the world’s perceptions of India at the level of daily culinary practice. The existing literature has viewed these sites mostly through perspectives on soft power, identity formation, and cultural representation in terms of the symbolic and affective impacts they exert within host societies. Drawing from international relations, food studies, and diaspora scholarship, this paper places overseas Indian restaurants as decentralised informal soft power actors outside of any framework controlled by the state. While their cultural and representative roles have been copiously documented otherwise; it is rather inadequately theorised and even more poorly empirically demonstrated how economic dimensions underlie their diplomatic salience. This paper highlights the fact that there has been no systematic analysis of the economic impact of diaspora restaurants. It puts forth the argument that while discussing culinary soft power and attempting to foreground, or bring into consideration, the material conditions that sustain it, one must regard economic viability not as incidental but rather as integral to the endurance and reach of informal diplomacy. This paper is another addition to the debate around soft power in its call for bringing cultural influence back into an integrated political economy approach with economic structures as a way of providing a fuller account of how diaspora kitchens participate in global diplomatic processes.

KEYWORDS

Gastrodiplomacy, Indian Diaspora, Soft Power, Informal Diplomacy, Culinary Political Economy, Diaspora Restaurants, Cultural Diplomacy, Everyday Diplomacy

February 27, 2026

Gendered Human Capital Misallocation in India: Education, Labour Market Barriers, and Policy Failure

Diaspora Kitchens and Diplomacy: Indian Restaurants as Informal Soft Power Sites Abroad