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A workday shouldn’t hinge on finding a usable toilet, yet for many women in India, it does. In her article for The Policy Edge, Kaushiki Sanyal, Fellow, JustJobs Network, argues that the focus on menstrual leave in India's policy debates misses a more immediate and pervasive constraint: the absence of functional sanitation. She contends that without addressing this everyday barrier, efforts to improve women’s workforce participation will remain incomplete.

JustJobs Network’s new research, supported by JPMorganChase, outlines pathways for sustainable youth employment in India.

Urban women’s participation in India’s labour market remains limited despite rising overall female labour force participation. This article examines whether platform work can enable women’s economic empowerment. It finds that platforms often reproduce inequalities through unpaid care burdens, unsafe mobility, and weak protections. Without improved infrastructure, childcare, safety, and labour protections, it risks becoming digitised informality rather than a pathway to mobility.

This report identifies gaps in the education-to-employment pipeline for youth. Drawing on stakeholder insights across sectors and practical experience from the ground on what works, it highlights key misalignments and offers actionable recommendations to strengthen these transitions.

India's welfare state is held together by over five million women, namely the ASHA workers, Anganwadi workers, and mid-day meal workers & helpers, who deliver essential public services daily, yet remain classified as 'volunteers', denied fair wages, formal contracts, and basic protections. This is no accident: with women already spending nearly twice as much time on caregiving as men, the state has long relied on deeply entrenched gender norms to keep care work cheap and informal. In this piece Renjini Rajagopalan makes the case for why it's time to move beyond the honorary label and recognise care work for what it truly is: work.

The DDU-GKY scheDespite schemes like DDU-GKY, formal skilling remains limited for rural youth, with only about 3.9 % accessing structured training compared with 7.1 % in urban areas. Persistent barriers such as low awareness, uneven outreach, mobility constraints, and social norms, particularly affect women’s participation. JJN’s research highlights that addressing these structural and social challenges is crucial to making skill training inclusive and effective for rural youth.me was designed to bridge skilling and formal jobs for rural youth. However, low awareness, distant placements, social factors, and curriculum gaps hinder uptake.

Exploring the critical role of structured career guidance in bridging India’s systemic gap between education and employment, while aligning aspirations with market realities to ensure successful employment transitions.

JustJobs Network's Aditya Prem Kumar examines why technical skills alone are no longer enough to ensure meaningful employment for India's youth — and what it will take to close the employability gap.

Drawing on JJN's research, IndiaSpend quotes Renjini Rajagopalan, Research Lead, Centre for Gender Analysis at JustJobs Network, on Karnataka’s fare-free public transport scheme, Shakti Yojane. In the article, she highlights the scheme's role in expanding women’s autonomy, while emphasising the need for improved service frequency and planning.

JJN's Isha Gupta provides crucial insights into why participation among young jobseekers remains low, highlighting the structural barriers that continue to hold India's youth back from accessing meaningful internship opportunities.