The recent NEET protests in July 2026 highlighted the use of women as focal points in public conflict. The incident involved both the prime minister’s late mother as well as a young 15-year-old female protester, resulting in public identification followed by cyberbullying. This particular incident gathered a lot of public attention.Every time violence against women makes headlines, the public debate focuses on safety, justice and punishment. Those conversations are important. But there is another question that receives far less attention: what does such violence cost the Indian economy? These authors examine evidence from government datasets and peer-reviewed publications and find that the economic impact is significant and requires urgent attention, given its direct relevance to India’s growth trajectory. Violence against women extends beyond the welfare considerations and has a significant growth issue.A record of what enters the system, not what happensThe NCRB’s Crime in India 2024 report, released in May 2026, logged 4,41,534 cases of crimes against women, roughly one FIR every 71 seconds, and a rise of more than 30% since 2014. Cruelty by a husband or his relatives remains the single largest category. In 96.8% of rape cases, the accused was known to the survivor.Reported crimes against women have risen more than 30% since 2014, dipping only in 2015 and the COVID-19 year of 2020.But an FIR records what enters the criminal justice system, not what happens. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6) finds that 22.3% of married women aged 18–49 have experienced spousal violence, including physical, sexual, or emotional. Applied to roughly 250 million married women in that band, that is some 56 million women. The gulf between 4.4 lakh registered cases and 56 million lived experiences is the first clue that the economic cost is badly understated.Violence as a macroeconomic shockPolicy discourse largely treats violence against women as a law-and-order problem. One good question to ask is what happens in situations when almost half of the potential labor force lives under a persistent threat to physical safety? The answer is that violence pushes women out of work, reduces productivity via poor health, and decreases their financial autonomy.A recent IMF paper with 235,000 female respondents also shows that exclusion from paid work increases intimate partner violence, and violence further ingrains exclusion.State-level association between domestic violence prevalence and urban female Labour Force Participation Rate, India.We also looked at the state-level pattern, and we found that across 29 major states, intimate partner violence and female labor force participation are negatively correlated in urban areas (r = −0.53, p = 0.003). Bihar, where one in three married women in urban areas reports intimate partner violence, and it records female labor force participation of merely 15.3%.On the other hand, Himachal Pradesh, where prevalence has fallen to 3.1%, reports participation of 43%. One would expect this to be true everywhere, but that is not the case. Delhi lies somewhere in the middle in terms of prevalence; however, the participation rate still remains lower.One potential reason could be that housing costs and household norms suppress work through other channels. However, the association remains consistent: Places where women face the highest risk of violence at home remain least present in the workforce in urban areas.India’s female participation has climbed on paper, from 23.3% in 2017–18 to 41.7% in 2023–24 (PLFS 2023–24, MoSPI), yet the country still ranks 131st of 148 on the WEF Global Gender Gap Report 2025 gauge of economic participation.The invisible subsidyAs per the Time Use Survey 2024, women spend 289 minutes per day on unpaid domestic work, compared with 88 minutes for men. The gap further increases, once we include caregiving. If we value this time at the replacement cost of formal labor, the unpaid work by women represents approximately 15 to 17% of GDP, which is equivalent to almost 45 lakh crores annually.Violence against women is a significant contributor to this structure, as it reduces women’s ability to participate in paid work, negotiate within household decision-making, or achieve economic and financial independence. As a result, abusive households perpetuate women’s concentration in unpaid labor and limit the economy’s access to their productive capacity.The time tax on women.India has around 458 million women of working age. If violence and its threat reduce female labor force participation by 5 to 10 percentage points (pp), consistent with World Bank findings that 31% of women identify personal safety as a barrier to employment, then an additional 23 to 46 million women could participate in the workforce under safer conditions.With average female earnings near Rs 1 lakh per year, the resulting foregone output is estimated at Rs 2.3 to Rs 4.6 lakh crore, or 0.8% to 1.6% of GDP. The above figures are conservative, as they account only for the supply channel from the labour and doesn’t include the productivity losses within employment, healthcare costs or intergenerational effects. World Bank cross-country analysis estimates the total cost of intimate partner violence at 1.2% to 3.7% of GDP.The effects of violence are incremental and do not stop here. Domestic violence increases the risk of anaemia and underweight status among women. Both of them are associated with childhood stunting. Stunted children experience long-term reductions in productive capacity. India’s Human Capital Index is 0.49, indicating that children born today are expected to achieve less than half of their potential productivity, and violence further reduces this figure. Exposure to violence in childhood is linked to earlier school leaving, earlier marriage, and lower labour force participation among girls, perpetuating the cycle across generations.Overall, India’s goal of becoming a developed economy by 2047 looks like a far-fetched dream, unless we address violence against women. The economic losses, amounting to several lakh crore rupees each year, stand in sharp contrast with the amount spent by the government (roughly Rs 600-800 crores annually) via the Ministry of Women and Child Development, which represents less than half of one per cent of the estimated cost.While public attention to incidents may be brief, the economic impact accumulates each year and is bound to pose a significant challenge to India’s fiscal and developmental objectives.Data sources: NCRB Crime in India 2014–2024; NFHS-6 (2023–24), IIPS and MoHFW; PLFS 2023–25, MoSPI; Time Use Survey 2024, MoSPI; Economic Survey 2025–26; WEF Global Gender Gap Report 2025; IMF Working Paper 2024/239 (Newiak, Sahay and Srivastava); World Bank VAWG Resource Guide; UNDP India, Who Cares? (2025); Ackerson and Subramanian (2008).Sonali Mishra is a PhD Scholar in the Economics area at IIT Bombay and Karan Babbar is an Assistant Professor of Economics at XLRI Jamshedpur.