The Unfinished Reform: Bringing Women’s Safety Within India’s Growth Story
Economic progress has transformed India’s schools and workplaces; the next challenge is to make homes equally safe.
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Gaurav Dhamija, IIT Hyderabad | Center for Research on Economics of Climate, Food, Environment and Energy (CECFEE), Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi
Punarjit Roychowdhury, Shiv Nadar University | Global Labor Organization | Monash University
Shreemoyee, IIT Hyderabad
SDG 5: Gender Equality | SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Institutions: Ministry of Women and Child Development
India’s growth story is often celebrated in classrooms and boardrooms. But inside homes, another story has barely changed: one in five married women continues to face physical violence from her partner – a figure that has hardly shifted in two decades.
The numbers expose a paradox. Fertility rates have fallen, alcohol consumption has declined, and more women than ever are literate, employed, and marrying later. Parliament enacted the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (PWDVA) in 2005, promising protection and redress. Yet according to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), 21.3 percent of married women reported physical violence in 2005–06; in 2019–21, the figure was 22.4 percent.
This paradox – progress in public life has not yet translated into safety in private life – demands exploring.
The Forces Driving and Resisting Change
Some protective trends are clear. Smaller families reduce household strain, lower alcohol use removes one of the most common flashpoints, and later marriage gives women greater influence in family decisions. NFHS data highlight how these shifts matter. Lower fertility means fewer children, which reduces household strain, strengthens women’s bargaining power, and ultimately lowers their prevalence of violence – by about one-third. Reduced alcohol consumption shows an even stronger effect, corresponding to nearly a 57 percent drop in the prevalence of violence over the last two decades.
But these gains are offset by new pressures. Women who take greater control of reproduction through contraception face a sharp backlash, with the prevalence of violence more than doubling. As more women move into non-agricultural jobs, traditional roles are unsettled, sometimes provoking resentment. The most powerful predictor remains husbands’ controlling behaviour – jealousy, restrictions on movement, or cutting women off from family and friends. Where such control is present, the prevalence of violence rises more than threefold.
Who is Most at Risk
The risk of violence is not evenly shared. Scheduled Caste women face the highest prevalence – above one in four. Muslim women, though showing improvement in recent surveys, still report elevated exposure compared with many other groups. Household conditions matter too: women in poorer or larger families face significantly greater risks. Age compounds these vulnerabilities, with younger women consistently more exposed.
The transmission of violence across generations is particularly troubling. Men who witnessed violence between their parents are more likely to become perpetrators themselves. For women, the scars of exposure also linger: those who saw violence as children or experienced it earlier in life face a markedly higher risk of further abuse in marriage, partly because early exposure normalises violence and weakens women’s bargaining power. Violence, in other words, is not only an individual act but a learned norm, reproduced across generations.
Geography adds another layer of complexity. Rural women report lower prevalence than their urban counterparts. Part of this gap likely reflects underreporting in villages, where stigma remains high. Yet genuine differences may also exist: tighter social networks in rural communities can provide informal protection, while urban households often face pressures of overcrowding, higher costs, and weaker community ties that intensify conflict.
How Culture Sustains Violence
One of the strongest predictors of violence is the belief that it is justified. Wives of men who believe that ‘disciplinary’ violence is acceptable are more likely to be abused than those whose husbands reject such beliefs.
Cultural influences also matter. Husbands with regular exposure to mass media are linked to roughly a 10 percent higher prevalence of violence, reflecting how films and television continue to normalise stereotypes of male control and female submission.
Why Men Must be Part of the Solution
Challenging these norms requires more than expanding women’s education, employment, and rights – the focus of much policy to date. Just as important is reshaping the everyday messages families absorb about gender and responsibility, whether in classrooms, community meetings, or on television.
Policies have tended to focus only on empowering women, while overlooking men – even though they are often the perpetrators – as potential partners in prevention and change. The survey data are clear: when women use contraception or move into non-agricultural jobs without male involvement, the risk of backlash rises sharply. Durable change depends on bringing men into the process rather than leaving them on the sidelines.
Some programmes point the way. Family planning programmes in Delhi have used couple counselling; Bihar’s PRACHAR initiative trained youth peer educators; campaigns in Mumbai and Goa used role-play exercises with couples. Each points to the same conclusion: men’s attitudes can shift when they are directly engaged. International evidence echoes this – peer dialogues and campaigns that frame masculinity around responsibility show measurable reductions in violence.
Lasting progress will come only when men are engaged as active partners in change.
Why Policy Needs Better Evidence
Designing effective programmes requires sharper data. The NFHS captures physical violence but captures little on emotional, sexual, or economic abuse. Self-reporting is also constrained by stigma, especially in conservative households. And its results are associational, not causal: they show patterns, not proof of cause and effect.
This matters for policy. Interventions – whether counselling programmes, awareness campaigns, or legal reforms – should be piloted and monitored before being scaled. Long-term studies that follow households, and district-level pilots that measure impact, would sharpen strategies. Evidence is not an academic luxury; it is the foundation of effective policy.
From Incomplete Gains to Lasting Change
The persistence of domestic violence is not a story of failure, but of unfinished reform. The next step is to back
programmes that confront controlling behaviour, break cycles of learned violence across generations, and challenge cultural attitudes that still normalise abuse. It also means holding men accountable as partners in family planning and women’s employment initiatives, not treating these as matters for women alone. And it means recognising that risks vary sharply by caste, class, religion, and geography – so interventions must be tailored, not uniform.
India has already shown that transformation is possible – in schools, in fertility, in incomes. The next frontier is the home, where lasting progress will be measured not just in growth but in safety, dignity, and equality.
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Authors:
The discussion in this article is based on the authors’ research published in the Journal of Quantitative Economics (2025). Views are personal.