India's Women's Reservation Bill 2023: A game-changer for gender equality

The Women’s Reservation Bill 2023 (128th Constitutional Amendment Bill), also known as the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, was passed on 19 September, 2023, marking a historic day for India. The bill reserves one-third of the seats in Lok Sabha, state legislative assemblies and the Delhi assembly for women. It is important to note that this reservation also applies to the seats reserved for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) in Lok Sabha and state legislatures. The reservation will become effective after the census conducted following the commencement of this Bill has been published. Based on the census, delimitation will be undertaken to reserve seats for women. The reservation will be provided for 15 years, but it shall continue until such date as determined by a law made by Parliament. In addition, seats reserved for women will be rotated after each delimitation, as determined by a law made by Parliament. The bill was first proposed on 12 September, 1996 during the Deve Gowda government, but it was finally implemented by the current Modi government of India. A key goal of the organisation is to give equal rights to women in the political sphere for their development by prioritising policymaking addressing issues related to gender inequality, women’s health, education and economic empowerment that will lead to their comprehensive development. Indian women have already achieved success in a number of fields including business, science, technology, arts, medicine and politics. As a result of breaking the societal glass ceiling in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects, Indian women are already challenging their male counterparts. During the recent launch of Chandrayaan-2 and 3, women scientists contributed to the success of the mission and etched their names in history’s golden pages. As seen in the Republic Day parade, where women lead the combat tableaus, women have been involved in the Indian Armed Forces. India’s journey towards women’s empowerment has both highs and lows. The Indian women enjoyed universal suffrage nearly 77 years ago, much before many of their Western counterparts. India is the second country in the world in modern history to have a female leader, Indira Gandhi as the Prime Minister in 1966 after Sri Lanka’s Sirimavo Bandaranaike in 1960. In 2022, India ranked 135th out of 146 countries regarding the global gender gap, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF). Even though the Constitution of India has guaranteed both genders equal rights under Articles 14 to 16, gender disparity still exists. Based on a compilation report by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy, India’s labour force participation rate is 39.5 per cent in 2022-23 and 40 per cent in 2021-22. The Financial Year (FY) shows that 66 per cent of men work and 8.8 per cent of women work, which is extremely low. In 1990, Indian women contributed 30 per cent to the formal economy, but it has decreased to less than 20 per cent now. In the workplace, women’s participation is gradually declining for many reasons. A few of these factors are conservative social norms, religious values, mobility to work, safety concerns and sexual harassment in the workplace. Due to societal taboos associated with women, many women fail to report sexual harassment to the police. According to the International Labour Organisation, approximately 80 per cent of women are working in India but in the informal economy sectors like agriculture, construction and household work like cooking, cleaning, etc. For child reading, society emphasises the mother as the paramount caregiver to the child leading women to leave their jobs instead of relying on their partner or co-habitants of the house. According to the report, India’s women’s labour force participation is lower than Bangladesh’s 38 per cent and Pakistan’s 25 per cent. The G7 nations (USA, UK, Germany, France, Japan and Canada), except for Italy, have a 50 per cent rate of women working as their counterparts. Even BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) India’s peers are increasing the women’s share in their formal economy by more than 50 per cent. According to Professor Jayati Ghosh, the Indian Development Economists, women are still working in India, but their work is not recognised. The work they do is mostly unpaid work like household work; working for unpaid work in the family enterprises and a higher wage gap between both the genders men and women making them demotivated to work. There are only a few jobs available for women in rural areas, except for agriculture. The services that witness growth in the country are telecom, oil, financial sectors, etc. which are mostly male dominated. Even at the corporate level also there is a huge gender gap where entry-level jobs are not difficult to join but the mid-level or high-level women positions are very few which could be due to family issues leading to an unemployment gap of 5-10 years making it difficult to bounce back to work. On that note, we can mention that out of 2,000 listed companies in the National Stock Exchange, only 100 ladies are at the top of the ladder as the CEO and MD of the companies. With an average young population of working age, India hopes to propel its growth to a developed economy. However, experts worry that the country may instead face demographic liability as 681 million people are women in India out of 1.40 billion and very less people are contributing to the formal economy. Ashwini Deshpande, an economist from Ashoka University, stated that if half of a nation’s population is absent, it’s detrimental to the modern economy. She thinks India could use the vast resources as a demographic dividend for scaling the economy to $5 to 8 trillion if we use the women’s labour force to a great extent. She exemplified how Chinese human resources can be utilised in manufacturing hubs. As per her suggestion, manufacturing units or food processing hubs should be established in remote areas to generate employment. The current progressive BJP government is promising to create 6 million jobs for the women communities of the country in the next five years. It has already introduced schemes like the Pradhan Mantri Mudra scheme for female entrepreneurs to avail loans for creating enterprises. There is another scheme launched by the Govt. In India, the ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padao’ scheme is designed to save girl children and educate them in the clusters of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Bihar, and Delhi. How much the government can do, but the hardest challenge is to overcome the patriarchal and patrilineal traditions that are deeply entrenched in many Indian families along with recognising the efforts and works of the women of our nation. Again, India should also take inspiration from the Japanese model where Japan’s prime-aged female labour force participation has visibly scaled from approximately 66.5 per cent in 2000 to 76.3 per cent in 2016 which is found to be mostly due to policy, demographic and economic factors. The World Bank has noted that a country cannot achieve its full potential if half of its population is engaged in unproductive and uneconomic activities so India should utilize its large women force to reach its goal to become a developed nation by 2047. According to the United Nations, “This quota reserving 33% seats for women will leapfrog India into one of 64 countries around the world who have reserved seats for women in their national Parliaments. Typically, achieving a critical mass of 30 per cent representation by women in Parliament is known to yield positive outcomes for women’s empowerment. However, we hope that implementing such reservations will ultimately lead to achieving 50 per cent representation of women in Parliaments across the globe.” Finally, reservations for women in politics are an important tool for challenging patriarchy and promoting gender equality, but they should also be part of broader strategies for promoting inclusion, equality and economic empowerment aimed at creating a more equitable and inclusive society by addressing cultural norms, education and economic empowerment. The writer is an entrepreneur, a mother, a firm believer in women’s empowerment, and a practitioner of Buddhist mindfulness meditation. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views. 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