Gender and Geography of the Bypass Economy

A bypass on the highway speeds up the traffic but makes it longer for locals to reach the highway. The same is true for the Indian economy. It improved tremendously for a few but bypassed many. What are the implications, and what can be done?

Vidya navigates the surprising intersections of gender, geography and economic life, and uncovers the hidden routes people take in our economy.

Vidya Mahambare is a professor of economics at the Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai, where she was program director of the PGDM course for six years. She has previously worked at the RBI and CRISIL. She is a 2020 and 2022 joint winner of the Emergent Ventures grant from the Mercatus Center to study the causes and consequences of low female labour force participation in India, and was a member of the Tamil Nadu State Planning Commission’s expert committee on employability and skilling.

She has an MSc and a doctorate in economics from Lancaster, and won the Pandurangi Prize for the first rank in the master’s in economics at the Gokhale Institute, Pune. She writes regularly for Mint, the Times of India, the Economic Times, The Hindu Business Line and others.