Authors: Om Dwivedi, Vivek Kumar, Riddhi Singh, Upasna Sharma, Garvit Chandra

ABSTRACT

There is something deeply contradictory about India’s development record. Between 2005 and 2021, over 415 million people were lifted out of multidimensional poverty, a feat remarkable by any global standard, and yet India continues to sit near the bottom of international rankings on female economic participation, safety, and autonomy. This paper investigates that contradiction. The central research problem is not simply that gender equality lags behind poverty reduction; it is that the metrics used to track poverty reduction are structurally incapable of detecting women’s individual capability deprivations because they measure at the household level rather than at the level of the person.

Through Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach and Martha Nussbaum’s articulation of Central Human Capabilities, this paper argues that India’s patriarchal social structure acts as a dominant negative conversion factor, meaning a structural barrier that systematically prevents household-level resources from becoming individual freedoms for women. Drawing on NFHS-5, the NSSO Time Use Survey (2019), NITI Aayog MPI reports, World Bank poverty estimates, and Oxfam India’s labour data, the study finds that across four domains of economic capability, asset control, political agency, and bodily safety, women’s combined capabilities remain severely constrained even within technically non-poor households. Spousal violence affects 29.3% of ever-married women. Female land ownership stands at 18.7%. Labour force participation hovers between 25 and 30%. These are not residual problems but structural features of how gender inequality persists beneath an apparently successful poverty reduction story. The paper concludes with specific, actor-directed policy recommendations and calls for a reorientation of national data collection toward individual-level capability measurement.

Keywords: Gender Inequality, Multidimensional Poverty, Capability Approach, Sustainable Development Goals, Women’s Empowerment, Intra-Household Inequality, Development Measurement