Discuss the impact of globalisation on trade, employment (particularly women employment), equality of income and wealth distribution etc.

Trade

• Tariff cuts, WTO rules, and later FTAs raised merchandise and services trade as a share of GDP; software, pharma, gems, and garments became the visible export face.
• Import competition cheapened consumer goods and intermediates, but it also hit small engineering and textile clusters that could not meet scale or standards.
• Global value chains reward on-time quality; they punish a port delay or a power cut, so coastal and metro India joined first.

Employment, especially women

• Aggregate job growth lagged output growth: services and capital-heavy factories added value faster than regular payrolls.
• Women entered export garments, electronics assembly, and IT-enabled services where buyers wanted a cheap, disciplined line; many of those jobs are informal, piece-rated, or without maternity cover.
• Care work, farm work, and domestic service still absorb most female labour; globalisation did not socialise that burden, so female labour-force participation stayed low by world standards.
• Migration for construction and Gulf work remitted cash, yet left women as de-facto farm managers without land title.

Income and wealth

• A consumption Gini often placed near 0.35 looks moderate; wealth and top incomes are more skewed because equity, urban land, and firm ownership concentrated.
• Skilled English-and-code workers captured global wages; informal wage workers faced world prices without world social security.
• Regional and caste gaps did not close automatically: a district off the highway can import Chinese goods without exporting anything of its own.

Globalisation is therefore a productivity shock with a distributional bill; policy must tax, skill, and union-protect, not reverse the customs gate.