Amitabh Kant, G20 Sherpa of India, on Tuesday said India cannot be a $5 or $10 trillion economy without women being a very major player in the Indian economy.

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Speaking at the "Future Female Forward - A Women’s Collective" event hosted by CNBC-TV18, Kant said the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS) shows that there are 1,022 women for 1,000 men. Most people do not know that there are more women than men in India.

"Similar is the case with the world. The world cannot grow. If you want inclusive, resilient, sustainable growth, then women-led development will have to be a very critical player. Therefore, the Prime Minister said women-led development has to be a key priority for India," he said.

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"So we are saying that you have to push for financial and digital inclusion of women. Earlier only 17 percent of women in India had bank accounts, but today 76 percent of the women have bank accounts. So bringing women into financial inclusion and digital inclusion will be transformational," Kant said.

The other panelist includes Auguste Tano Kouame, country director to India at World Bank; Hitendra Dave, CEO of HSBC India and Suresh Narayanan, chairman, and managing director of Nestle India.

Kouame said there are more than 150 countries that still have barriers to women's ability to work, to have assets, and to make use of their god-given talent.

However, India is doing very well. For example, on opening access to bank accounts to women. Many countries are not doing that yet in the South Asia region.

"Among emerging market economies, when it comes to female labour force participation, we are not doing great, in fact, India is doing less than the average. So it is not enough to give just access to bank accounts to women, it is a good step but you have to bring them into the labour force," Kouame said.

"The world could increase its per capita by 20 percent just by allowing women to work as much as men. India could grow at 1.2 percent more than what it is currently growing just by catching up with emerging market economies in terms of women’s ability to work," he said.

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Dave said, "You cannot have 50 percent of the population not getting an equal opportunity or being deprived despite having the merits. So we felt that giving equal opportunity to women is not a CSR activity and as the CEO we have a job to make sure that the company performs to the best it can."

"The only way it will perform the best it can is when you get the full quality of ideas, a better quality leadership, a better quality workforce. So giving women equal opportunity is the right thing to do," Dave said.

Narayanan said in our company, we are always been friendly and always prided ourselves in being one of the best workplaces for women to be in.

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"I started with a simple vision that, can I start with the board at 50 percent? And we achieved it. What I am most proud about is that we have a factory in Sanand in Gujarat where 60 percent of that factory are women," he said.

(Edited by : Jomy Jos Pullokaran)

First Published:Mar 14, 2023 11:52 PM IST