For the third consecutive year, India has suffered a setback in women’s representation in Parliament or Legislative Assemblies. Inter Parliamentary Union has released a handout on the occasion of International Women’s Day on March 8 in which the status of India in the matter of giving representation to women in Legislative Assemblies or the Parliament of India stand at low scale. The report puts India in bad light when compared with other Asian countries. For example, it says that in Asia, women’s representation in Parliament increased by 0.5 per cent, from 18.8 per cent in 2015 to 19.3 per cent in 2016. Increases, while moderate, were registered in all the countries holding elections – Iran, Japan, Laos, Mongolia, the Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam – “with one notable exception” of India. India recorded the region’s only setback. This is not at all a healthy sign and has to be improved. Although a proposed constitutional amendment was introduced in 2008 that intended to reserve national- level seats for women, yet it continues to be bogged down in Parliamentary debate.
The point is that India is the largest democracy in the world. It is but natural that the largest democracy should have proportionate number of women in the Parliament and Assemblies and in decision making bodies. This is not the case. Although literacy percentage has increased in India and vast efforts are made to encourage women take part in all activities of life, yet in the matter of empowering women in the country with political power has remained at a very low level. This could be more a social than economic or political problem. Education alone may not be a solution to this problem. The status of woman in India needs to be re-examined in terms of growth of social consciousness. Direct and indirect elections and Government appointments in June and July 2016 returned a total of 27 women of the 244 members of Rajya Sabha. This was a 1.7 per cent decline in the number of women to 11.1 per cent from 12.8 per cent at the previous renewals. Discussing the world situation of women empowerment, the report says ten years ago, women held 16.8 per cent of Parliamentary seats in the world – a 6.5 percentage point gain over the last decade. However, the rate of progress has stabilized in the recent years, underlining the need for relentless efforts in order to achieve gender balance in politics. Our country has not been able to keep pace with this rate of increase and as such, we are required to put in great efforts to come up to the international level. With increase of women representation in law making bodies and also in decision making bodies, we can expect that we are contributing to the spectrum of rights of women as enshrined in the Charter of Human Rights. This is the reason why the report, as in previous years, stresses that women’s political empowerment cannot be taken for granted. This syndrome needs to be broken and we need to establish our place among the democracies that understand and concede the rights of women in right earnest. Interestingly, women hold now 19.1 per cent of all presiding officer posts in the world, an almost three-per-cent point increase since 2015. India is among the countries that has a women speaker in the Lower House of Parliament.
Speaking at the Nari Shakti (Women Power) Puraskar on the occasion of the International Women’s Day, the President lamented that violence against women had increased in our country and this was a distressing development. He rejected gender discrimination as against the spirit of Indi and abhorred the idea that women in India are feeling insecure to move about freely without being disturbed. The President said that we are proud of the outstanding role of our women in contemporary India in all fields from administration, to sports to scientific inventions and explorations. We need to do more to come up to the mark of number one country in the word providing safety security and protection to women and removing gender discrimination.
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