60% of our girls cannot go outside the house alone.

Our finding

Why we rated this “Misleading”

What the survey question actually asks

The figure behind this claim comes from the National Family Health Survey, and the exact wording of its question changes how the number should be read.

NFHS asks whether a woman is usually allowed to go alone to all three of: the market, a health facility, and places outside her village or community. NFHS-5 found 42% of women aged 15 to 49 were permitted all three. [1]

The inverse — 58% — is where "cannot go outside the house alone" comes from. But that is not what the residual measures. A woman permitted to go alone to the market and to a health facility, but not outside her community, counts in that 58%. She is not someone unable to leave her house alone.

The measure is a composite of three permissions. Failing any one of them places a woman outside the 42%.

The direction of travel

Presenting 42% on its own implies deterioration. The survey series shows the opposite.

NFHS-3, covering 2005-06, put the figure at 33%. [2] By NFHS-5 it had reached 42% — an improvement of nine percentage points across the series. [3] [4] [5]

Between the two most recent rounds the movement was smaller: 41% in NFHS-4 to 42% in NFHS-5. That is close to flat, and it is fair to describe recent progress as having slowed. It is not a decline.

Age changes the picture substantially

The single national figure conceals a wide spread that is more informative than the headline.

Among women aged 15 to 19, the share permitted all three is 26%. Among women aged 40 to 49, it is 55%.

That gradient suggests the constraint operates most strongly on young and unmarried women, easing considerably with age and changed household status. A national average of 42% describes neither group well.

Where the claim goes wrong

Three things are lost in the compression.

The composite question is presented as though it measured whether women can leave the house at all, which it does not. The nine-point improvement across survey rounds is omitted, leaving an impression of stasis or decline. And the age variation, which is where the real finding sits, disappears into a single average.

What the number still shows

None of this makes 42% a good figure.

More than half of Indian women aged 15 to 49 face restrictions on independent movement to at least one ordinary destination. Among women aged 15 to 19, roughly three in four do. That is a substantial constraint on education, work and healthcare access, and progress of nine points over roughly two decades is slow.

The correction is about what the statistic measures and which way it has moved — not a suggestion that restrictions on women's mobility are a minor issue.

In short

NFHS measures permission to go alone to three specific places. That figure rose from 33% in NFHS-3 to 42% in NFHS-5, and ranges from 26% among the youngest women to 55% among the oldest. It is not a measure of women unable to leave home alone.