In this Mint article, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha writes that India has one of the lowest rates of female participation in the labour force and this holds back economic growth:

"... while the fact that India has one of the lowest levels of female labour force participation among emerging markets could be because of structural problems, it is not at all clear why women have withdrawn from the labour force after 2005 despite the rise in incomes... Indian states in the southern and eastern parts of the country do better than the northern states. Bihar has the worst record. But then, Uttar Pradesh does better than Punjab. Chhattisgarh does better than Maharashtra. Kerala has only a middling record...

David Dollar and Roberta Gatti of the World Bank argued in a 1999 paper that gender inequality arising from either social prejudice or market failure is in effect a distortionary tax that hurts economic growth...