India's Equal Remuneration Mandate: Persistent Wage Gaps Despite the Code on Wages

India's Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 required equal pay for the same or similar work regardless of gender. Its provisions have since been consolidated into the Code on Wages, 2019, which — alongside three companion labour codes — came into force nationwide on 21 November 2025, with the Wages (Central) Rules, 2026 notified to operationalise it. The Code prohibits gender-based discrimination in matters of wages and is enforced by central and state labour departments.

Nearly fifty years after the original Act, India's official Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), run by the National Statistical Office under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, continues to record large gender wage gaps. In the April–June 2024 quarter, the average monthly wage for rural regular salaried employees was ₹18,200 for men versus ₹12,396 for women — women earning about 68% of men's wages, a gap of roughly 32%. The PLFS 2023–24 annual report (released September 2024) shows the gap persists across employment categories: self-employed men earn roughly three times what self-employed women earn, and male casual labourers earn about 1.5 times more than their female counterparts.

Independent legal analysis published by the International Bar Association attributes part of the law's limited effect to its narrow scope: it applies only to "the same work or work of a similar nature," a test based on the skill, effort and responsibility required, which does not address the systematic undervaluation of female-dominated occupations relative to male-dominated ones of comparable value. The same analysis notes that Section 16 of the Act allows the government to exempt pay differences justified by "a factor other than sex," a provision that has created ambiguity in enforcement. A 2024 DBS Bank India/CRISIL survey cited in the same analysis found a 23% perceived gender pay gap among salaried women in metropolitan India, and the World Economic Forum's 2023 Global Gender Gap Report ranked India 127th of 148 countries on pay parity.

Because the current Code on Wages regime only came into full nationwide force in November 2025, there has not yet been time to evaluate its effect under the new framework specifically; the wage-gap evidence above reflects the outcome of the preceding near five decades of equal-pay law rather than the new Code alone.

Read the full analysis: https://www.ibanet.org/rethinking-Indian-law-on-equal-pay-towards-gender-pay-equality-in-workplace