Gender Policy – Gaps between intention and action in

India
B R Siwal
Deputy Director
NIPCCD, NEW DELHI
Emal:brsiwal@gmail.com

The Constitution of India not only provide equality to women but also empower
state to adopt measures of positive discrimination in favour of women for neutralising the
cumulative socio-economic, educational and political disadvantaged faced by them. To
uphold the constitutional mandate, the state has enacted various legislative measures intend
to ensure equal rights, to counter social discrimination and various forms of violence and
atrocities and to provide support services within the broad goals laid down by the Five
Year Plans, Government also formulated women related policies like National Policy on
Education, National Health Policy, National Population Policy, National Nutrition Policy.

India has ratified various international conventions and human rights instruments
commuting to secure equal rights of women. Key among there is ratification of the
Convention of Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
The convention promotes the substantive model of equality: - equality of opportunity,
equality of access and equality of rights. Besides the CEDAW several other instruments
have been ratified notably the Convention on the Rights of Child, Convention on Civil and
Political Rights, Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. India has also
endorsed the Mexico Plan of Action Nairobi forward looking strategies, Beijing Platform
for Action.

To achieve the objective of equality the Government has indicated many welfare
and development programmes in its Five Year Plans. It also created various institutions
e.g. National Commission for Women. Recently Government also adopted National
Policy for the Empowerment of Women (2001) with goal to bring about the advancement,
development and empowerment of women. The policy give prescriptions for positive
socio-economic policies, equal access to participate in decision making, equal access to
health, education, employment, strengthening the legal system, mainstreaming gender
perspective in the development etc.

Inspite of Constitutional provisions, legal safeguards, ratification of various united

conventions, policies, platform of action, plan programmes, policies and planned
programmes the desired results for gender equality has not been achieved. There is
widespread gaps between government intentions and actions in all the spheres.
Institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women

Commitment

• Create or strengthen national machineries and other governmental bodies.

• Integrate gender perspectives in legislation, public policies, programmes and
projects.
• Generate and disseminate gender-disaggregated data and information for planning
and evaluation.
Gaps
A lack of adequate financial and human resources is the main obstacle confronting
national machineries, compounded by a lack of understanding of gender equality and of
gender mainstreaming, prevailing gender stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes,
competing government priorities and insufficient links to civil society.

The Department of Women and Child Development has proposed to set up

National Resource Centre for Women. This intention of the Government has been
reflected in past ten annual reports of the Department. In spite of Government
commitment on various platforms so far no progress has been made. Similarly the
Government proposes to appoint Commissioner for Women’s Rights which is still pending
for action.

Many schemes in the Department of Women and Child Development and Rural
Area Employment have been initiated. No proper evaluation have been done about their
impact on women’s line. The only achievement is change in the names of schemes such as
Indira Mahila Yojana, Integrated Women’s Empowerment Project, Swayam Sidha Swa-
shakti etc. The Balika Samriddhi Yojana, lack clear perspective and non-strata in many
states. The State Women Development Corporations in many states face resource crunch
and many of their units have been closed down.

The promises enshrined in the Indian Constitution and the vision of women’s full
emancipation will not be realized unless we gear ourselves once again to intervene more
forcefully in the polity and public policy. By public policy we do not mean only policy
documents actually released from time to time by the government in power, but actions by
public agencies in all sectors of life to promote gender equality and gender justice. The
women’s movement in the country has been instrumental in bringing about improvements
in the rights of women; in enforcing rights already granted to them; in calling attention to
the serious lacuna in many legal provisions and procedures; in monitoring the actual status
of women in several sectors through research and data; in mobilizing women’s groups in
campaigns and protests; in organizing support and help for many sections of women for
employment, income, health, education, legal help, etc.; in generating a resurgence of
women’s creative activity; and in forming alternative organizational innovations… the list
is endless. Yet at the end of it all, the record of progress is patchy at best and dismal at
worst going by the human development report on gender indices for India.

Quite apart from the nitty-gritty of incentives and structural reforms, it will be
interesting to see how the government’s own decade-long experience of making reforms
work in other sectors informs this process. For instance, it should be clear now that the
provision of credit or even offering special subsidies and schemes for deprived groups will
make little difference in the absence of institutional changes which in turn cannot be
implemented unless they are grounded in the local social and political matrix. In other
words, it is not enough to ensure, say, credit adequacy, but also that access to it and its
benefits is spread widely enough to contribute to increasing the overall productivity of the
sector and the well-being of the people engaged in it.

The fact that women form a critical component of the labour force in agriculture is
well known. The latest census lends further evidence of this, with a sharp rise in the
female work participation rates in the rural areas from 22.3 per cent in 1991 to 25.7 per
cent in 2001. And even this, it is clear, does not reflect the real extent of women’s labour.
Moreover, there is a sufficient literature on and estimates of the substantial numbers of
women-headed households, a large proportion of which are not even recognised as such.
Also, it has been clear that none of the programmes – whether it is credit access or
extension schemes for technology dissemination – have especially benefited women. In
fact there are enough indicators that overall, the structural, institutional and organisational
changes under way push women farther to the fringes of the formal economy. Studies of
green revolution economies have shown that the introduction of technology which makes
work easier in jobs traditionally considered the woman’s domain inevitably pushes women
out of those jobs.

At another level, there is growing evidence from several countries that the opening
up of international trade in commodities and farm products tends to marginalize women in
the formal production system. This in turn drastically and negatively affects the families’
food security. Partly this is because rising wage rates are captured by men and partly
because current patterns of women’s employment fail to gain accommodation and women
move from formal to informal, from wage worker to casual worker, depending on domestic
and family compulsions. Given this, changes directed at productive efficiency as measured
at the point out output may will act to push out workers who do not have the social,
hierarchical or political pull to force the system to accommodate flexibilities of
employment patterns. While this is true in any sector, in agriculture it will be particularly
telling and will in the long run affect even narrow economic notions of productivity and
efficiency.

Food Security

• Despite the fact that poverty in India is largely concentrated in the rural sector
(three fourths of the poor live in rural areas and female headed households register
 poverty levels that are far higher than the average), little attention has been paid to
agriculture.
• The shift towards agricultural exports and away from food crops to cash crops is a
serious threat to food security.
• Rising food prices affect both the rural and urban poor who basically procure their
food supply through the Public Distribution System (PDS).

In any case, institutional change brought about for limited purposes often
influences other changes. For instance, self-help groups set up mainly as micro-credit
enterprises often with linkages to institutions such as NABARD to expand credit flows to
the sector have been found to promote political mobilisation among women. However, in
the absence of a gender perspective, extension service schemes for ‘diversification and
modernisation of agricultural practices’ have not evidently been linked to credit operations.

Women and the environment

Commitment

• Involve women actively in environment decision-making at all levels.

• Integrate gender concerns and perspectives in policies and programmes for
sustainable development.
• Strengthen or establish mechanisms at the national, regional and international
levels to assess the impact of development and environmental policies on women.
Gaps

There is a lack of public awareness about environmental issues and the benefits of
gender equality for promoting environmental protection. Environmental policies and
programmes lack a gender perspective and fail to account for women’s roles and
contributions to environmental sustainability. The low presence of women in the
formulation and execution of environmental policy and their under-representation in
decision-making bodies are aggravating factors.

Violence against women

Commitment

• Take integrated measures to prevent and eliminate violence against women.

• Study the causes and consequences of violence against women and the
effectiveness of preventive measures.
• Eliminate trafficking in women and assist victims due to prostitution and
trafficking.

Gaps
 A lack of understanding of the root causes of violence against women and
inadequate data on the various forms of violence hinders efforts. Socio-cultural attitudes
and values reinforce women’s subordinate place in society. Although improving, the
response of legal officials, especially criminal justice officials, is weak in many countries,
while prevention strategies remain fragmented and reactive.

Globalisation and Women’s Rights

• The shift in thinking from development aid to market forces promoted by the
World Bank and the IMF under the current trend of neo-liberal economics has
brought in its wake a series of problems which include budget cuts, downsized
operations, the shutting down of operations by multilateral and bilateral agencies.
• Globalization has meant a retreat by the State. Women are now forced to work in
exploitative conditions where they do not have many of the rights and privileges
they were able to claim earlier under the available labour laws.

The mounting violence against women is another alarming signal that the
elimination of the subordinate status of women is not as easily overcome as we thought,
and that we underestimated the strength of patriarchy and casts politics. Public policy and
its implementation had made many efforts in may directions but is weakening visibly
today. The Committee on the Status of Women made a clarion call to equality; the call is
lost in the new slogan of ‘empowerment’, a vaguer concept, hard to measure. Under it, any
kind of action for women becomes empowerment. In the name of participation, many
responsibilities are added without any reduction in the basic set of deprivations or work
burdens; employment and education become tools for family welfare rather than women’s
source of freedom; birth control is manipulation for population control rather than true
release from reproductive burdens. More than that, the rhetoric of empowerment can
evade the contingent clause that the oppressors when clearly identified should be brought
to book. Our judges and lawyers, the police and the entire criminal justice system in the
majority of cases fail to give justice to women victims, and the offenders area acquitted
most of the time.

Throughout the 1980s, women’s groups kept addressing the state in the sincere
belief that only through public policy can the status of women be improved. Changing the
status of women within the family and community by directly addressing gender disparity
and power imbalance was not easy; the threat to established structures would provoke too
prompt a backlash. Public policy and the weight of authority the government has, they
hoped, would work in women’s favour and by building support through better programms
addressed directly to women, women could be strengthened to fight against discrimination
at home. Perhaps this was too optimistic a view; perhaps it was subject to the vicissitudes
of changes in government as later events showed. Nevertheless, these interventions did
have some impact. The class position of the leaders of the women’s movement made
access to government officials easier.
 In several ways, what little was offered through public programmes was sourced by
women’s collectives, assisted and supported by women NGOs, thereby giving a voice to
grassroots women. That the gap between acceptance of women’s needs and
recommendations and actual policy and programmes remained unbridgeable is not solely
the fault of wrong strategy by the women’s movement. No political party really pushed
women’s issues. The political milieu was strengthening the hands of those who were
pushing for nation-building, and fundamentalism was rearing its head. In this scenario,
women’s attempts to shift the direction of policy remained ineffective notwithstanding the
sops that were offered. The various programmes remained disconnected from each other
and there was no overall coherence.

Given the widening gap in access to social security both between classes and
gender, this is of particular importance, but the policy under the forms is to reduce
subsidies and government expenditure regardless of whom it affects most. But for low
yield, low infrastructure investment in agriculture outside the well-endowed sectors, bad
storage, etc., India has the biggest potential to become the world’s food basket because we
have a greater proportion of our land mass as arable land and more sunshine than the
advanced countries. A shortsighted export policy of food-grains may not help us achieve
this status. Food security is of prime concern to women in poorer households; so is
employment.

Women and economy

Commitment

• Promote women’s economic rights and independence, including access to

employment, appropriate working conditions and control over economic resources.
• Facilitate women’s equal access to resources, employment, markets and trade.
• Provide business services, training and access to markets, information and
technology, particularly to low-income women.
• Strengthen women’s economic capacity and commercial networks.
• Eliminate occupational segregation and all forms of employment discrimination.
• Promote harmonization of work and family responsibilities for women.

Gaps

Benefits of the growing global economy have been unevenly distributed, creating
wider economic disparities, unsafe work environments and persistent gender inequality in
the informal economy and rural sector. Women with comparable skills to men lag behind
men in income and career mobility in the formal sector.

There has been no feminization of labour as argued by some. Out of 19 industries

studied, female labour remained stagnant in 10, decreased in two and increased only in
seven. The increase in absolute numbers relative to male labour was small. Hindustan
Level decentralized so that from 600 women it once employed, it now has only three.
Much of the female labour has entered into traditional female occupations. Most
significantly, female labour has become increasingly casual/temporary/insecure with poor
rewards. Even the organized sector has resorted to such strategies to turn skilled female
labour into casual labour.

Lacking autonomy and facing political interference, the public sector became
inefficient and overstaffed. Reforms were definitely called for to improve the performance
of the economy, but under the Structural Adjustment Programme instituted by the World
Bank and IMF, the unevenness of development accentuated further under a suddenly
unleashed market economy. Given the vulnerability of the poorer sections and women,
their situation has worsened. There was faster economic growth but it did not lead to more
secure employment and some recent studies have shown that growth did not result in any
further reduction of poverty either. Much has been written about the adverse gender
impact of these policies. Poverty has multiple and complex causes and the expectation that
economic growth would increase income and employment may not be fulfilled, for it
would depend on whether the new developments promote labour-intensive technologies or
capital-intensive technologies. Large industries opt for capital-intensive production to
become ‘competitive.’ The assumption that all that is necessary is investment in human
capital – education and health – is also not valid. Poverty is primarily lack of productive
assets and unless physical capital and productive assets are generated by appropriate
policies, and unless there is redistribution, the well-being of the majority is unlikely to be
taken care of. For example, land redistribution will serve several goals – data suggest that
small landholdings have higher income per hectare and have an incentive to reduce birth
rate. In this context, public expenditure for infrastructure development becomes critical.
Given the government’s withdrawal in this area, and given the gender skewness, ‘women’s
development’ will take a back seat. On the other hand, there is the belief that the rich
much be paid more and they must not be taxed to induce them to work, while the workers
can be retrenched under the ‘leaner, meaner’ goal.

Women and Poverty

Commitment

Strategic Objective

• Review, adopt and maintain macroeconomic policies and development strategies

that address the needs and efforts of women in poverty.
• Revise laws and administrative practices to ensure women’s equal rights and access
to economic resources.
• Provide women with access to savings and credit mechanisms and institutions.
Gaps

Income inequality, unemployment and depending levels of poverty of the most

vulnerable groups, especially rural and poor women, contribute to the widening economic
gap between men and women.

The New Economic Policy was launched in 1991-92 and this led to an era of
structural adjustment and economic reform, liberalization and the opening up of the
economy of free trade and global capital. The Structural Adjustment policies that followed
the post liberalization phase, affected women in particular ways:

• The process of globalisation, in particular, has been especially painful to specific

groups such as the poor and marginalized women, peasant women and women
workers of the unorganised sector.
• Social sector expenditure and public investment have been slashed. Real per capita
spending on the social sector infrastructure covering housing, health and sanitation
has fallen sharply. Public capital formation has been drastically cut.

• A major failure of the New Economic Policy has been the inadequate generation of
employment in the country.
• There has been an absolute reduction in rural non-agricultural employment since
1991, leading to distress among women displaced or marginalized by the agrarian
process.
• In urban centres, declining male employment has led to an increase in casual
employment. This makes for insecurity and reduced incomes.

There have been schemes for aiding women in micro-enterprises but these are ad
hoc programmes. Some women narrate harrowing stories of how they have to run from
pillar to post for micro-credit, which has been hailed as a great achievement. No doubt
they represent women’s thrift potential and self-help groups do assist poor women. But if
we see the record of nationalized and schedule banks’ credit given to households and
individuals, these have diminished in importance over successive years so that rural India
and the poor everywhere even today rely heavily on non-bank credit like money lenders
with high rates of interest. The earlier priority lending and differential rate of interest have
been abandoned by banks in the quest for profits.

Government sponsored development programmes like the women’s development

project in Rajasthan ran into trouble when women became really assertive. The
development policies and programmes initiated by the government for women have been
of two kinds: firstly, programmes to integrate women into development and secondly,
special development programmes for women. The development model itself which has
been manipulated by the dominant class/caste group and has let to the increasing
impoverishment of large sections of working people as well as severe ecological crisis.
 The Department of Women and Child Development came out with a National
Policy for the Empowerment of Women. It is a misnomer to call it a ‘policy.’ The
document is disappointing in that it betrays no knowledge of all that has happened on the
women’s front in the aftermath of the economic reforms and is a series of ad hoc
suggestions made many times before; it suffers from an ideological vacuum and an
overload of laudable ‘intentions’ but lacks any kind of vision. The onus is put on women
to empower themselves and there is very little by way of policy goals or implementing
strategies that will create conditions for gender equality. It has nothing to say on the
International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention on home workers not being ratified by
India.

All in all, ‘women are expected to participate in decision – making, while the issues
on which they would like to decide move outside the jurisdiction of these decision –
making bodies themselves, not only theoretically but in effect because there are wider
processes in the economy and the market’. Not merely that – the present right-wing
politics has made it much harder for women to act on a united front.

There have been a plethora of schemes for rural employment. The Swaran Jayanti
Rozgar Yojana was supposed to help the poor, but little impact on women’s lives. Women
as producers in farm forestry are not represented in forest personnel. Women also do not
get sufficient information on what they can collect, and get hauled up by forest officials.
Fuel substitutes like gobar (bio) gas or solar cookers have not become real alternatives
because of their high cost and poor maintenance. Efficient fuel use through smokeless
chulhas (stoves) has run into rough weather because of bad planning and design
inappropriate to women’s cooking practices. The high health cost to women due to wood
smoke continues. The Tata Energy Research Institute (1997) rightly argues that pollution
control is not to be measured by ambient air quality, but by its impact on people’s health.

Health

Regarding health policy, suffice it to say the same battle has been going on to gear
the healthcare system to promote women’s well-being and not be obsessed solely with
their ‘mother’ role. If this interest in the mother really received adequate attention, we
would not have one of the highest figures of maternal mortality and a poor gender
development index. The paucity of resources at Primary Health Centre (PHC) level, poor
staffing, inadequate referral services, poor nutritional intake for girls and women, irrational
drug policies, insensitivity of health personnel to women’s ailments and distress – these are
many more maladies the afflict our healthcare system have been highlighted by researches.
Among NGOs in rural and urban areas, a large number of them are working to promote
preventive community health and bring about greater health awareness among women. It
has snags, however, in that what the government should be doing is now taken over by
NGOs. As it is privatisation has diminished what little by way of PHC we had. Even poor
households in India spend a disproportionate share of their income on health. Public
expenditure on health is a meagre 2.5 percent of GDP. If one sees this against the 18
percent subsidies given to the well-to-do industrialists and agriculturists, we can conclude
where the priorities lie. Occupational health hazards is an area that has merited very little
attention in policy or practice. It is not the size of our population that should worry us, but
its poor quality that should really engage us. If proof was needed, there is plenty available
historically and in contemporary empirical data that voluntary restriction of family size
comes with social development.

Women and health

Commitment

• Increase women’s access throughout the life cycle to appropriate, affordable and
quality health care, information and related services.
• Strengthen preventive programmes that promote women’s health.
• Undertake gender-sensitive initiatives that address sexually transmitted diseases,
HIV/AIDS, and sexual and reproductive health issues.
• Promote research and dissemination information on women’s health.
• Increase resources and monitor follow-up for women’s health

Gaps

Progress was constrained by the absence of a holistic approach to health care for
women and girls throughout the life cycle, exacerbated by a lack of gender-sensitive health
research and technology, data disaggregated by sex and age, and user-friendly indicators.
A shortage of financial and human resources led to inadequate infrastructure and service
delivery.

• An alarming rise in incidences of female foeticide or sex determination testing to

eliminate the female foetus as a discriminatory choice; preference being given to a
male child.
• Maternal morbidity and mortality in Indian women are among the highest in the
world.
• About 15 per cent of all deaths of women in childbearing age are pregnancy-
related. 30 per cent of female mortality in this age group is due to communicable
diseases.
• There are continuing biases in Government programmes and policies relating to
women’s health. Several decades of concerted gender unequal programming has
led to some 99 per cent female sterilization as opposed to a merely one per cent of
male sterilization. Similar biases show up in the lack of comprehensive, gender-
sensitive perception on health, inadequate budgets, the lack of adequate health
centres or transport in rural areas to provide access for women.

Education and training of women

Commitment

• Ensure equal access to education

• Eradicate illiteracy among women
• Improve women’s access to vocational training, science and technology, and
continuing education.
• Develop non-discriminatory education and training.
• Allocate sufficient resources for and monitor the implementation of educational
reforms.
• Promote lifelong education and training for girls and women.

Gaps

Efforts to eradicate women’s illiteracy and increase girls’ access to all levels and
types of education were constrained by, among other things, a lack of resources to improve
educational infrastructure and undertake educational reforms; persisting gender
discrimination and bias; and sex-segregated occupational stereotyping in schools and
communities.

Thus, girl’s and women’s education was accepted as important all along and there
were recommendations related to training of more women teachers, curriculum, etc., but
there was no appreciation of the fact that the supply of schools and teachers was not
enough to induce parents to send girls to school and retain them there. Time and again,
factors have been identified which militate against parental desire for girls’ education
especially in rural areas: girls are needed to assist the family in their occupation as well as
help with housework and childcare; they go away after marriage and the returns from
education would be reaped by someone else; sons were important and received priority in
terms of family investment. Research has vindicated these as unsullied truths.

Despite pronouncements to the contrary, there are many missing steps in the
implementation of these lofty ideals and realization of these ideas is far from being
achieved, even modestly. The missing steps are: inadequate hostels for girls and those that
do exist are of a poor standard; very little is done to gear the positive interventionist role of
education so that the educational curriculum is even today dominated by academic thrusts
and market-led courses; Women’s Studies centres and cells may be doing good work, but
they lack proper leadership and adequate resources. Poor infrastructure and insufficient
resources have made their tasks difficult and ineffective. State governments are loath to
provide support once the University Grants Commission (UGC) grants run out. In general,
there is a lack of broader perspective and imagination, insufficient autonomy and
stranglehold of university bureaucracy, tardy and erratic release of funds by the UGC and,
to cap it all, a low underfined status for Women’s Studies within the academia.

Access is one problem. For even those who do complete schooling, the system has
done little to remote gender bias in textbooks, curricular materials, and school practices.
Education, even at higher levels, continues to be problematic for women given a pervasive
patrifocal family structure and ideology. A major gap is still found in the narrow
discipline concentration among women in higher education. Concern has been expressed
in many committees and by women’s groups on the importance of increasing the presence
of women in Science and Technology and in professional streams.

Education

• Half the Indian population is illiterate. Women make up two thirds of this number
with female literacy being lower than male and being most adverse among
Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes people.
• Education is one sector which has faced consistent budgetary cuts.
• Women constitute the largest group among the adult non-literate population in
India. The magnitude of the problem of illiteracy can be gauged from the absolute
number of non-literate women.
• The problem of women’s lack of access to education is exacerbated because of law
enrolment and high drop out rates among girls who enter formal schools. Societal
attitudes and prejudices, as well as the drawing of girls and women into household
work are in large measure responsible for this. The drop out rate is particularly
high among women who live in rural areas, and becomes acute among the under-
privileged sections.

However, considering that the bulk of technological advances have never addressed
women’s work and the enormous drudgery it involves, is one wrong in asking that in the
present some of it may be eased? Is it wrong to ask that the larger society share some of
the work burden induced by the sexual division of labour through provision of facilities
that make parenting easier? Altering the sexual division of labour at home is not easy as it
has to take place in individual homes; public action is easier and can exert influence and be
effective in creating space for women. True, it is not going to meet the ultimate feminist
goal of changing gender relations, but some steps can, if pursued alongwith others, take us
nearer that goal. We have always had this tension between asking for recognition of what
women do and asking for it to be reduced or abandoned to make room for other self-
enhancing activities. Swaminathan objects to the tone of the document, saying it reflects
the marginalization of women by designating issues as women’s issues, not peoples’
issues.

Women in power and decision-making

Commitment

• Take measures to ensure women’s equal access to and full participation in power
structures and decision-making.
• Increase women’s capacity to participate in decision-making and leadership.
Gaps

A gap between de jure and de facto equality has persisted. Traditionally assigned
gender roles circumscribe women’s choices in education and careers and compel women to
assume the burden for household responsibilities. Initiatives and programmes aimed at
women’s increased participation in decision-making are hindered by a lack of human and
financial resources for training and advocacy for political careers, and accountability of
elected officials for promoting gender equality and women’s participation in public life.

• Despite vigorous campaigning by women’s groups, and despite the State’s

commitment to increasing women’s political participation, all political parties have
been more than reluctant to field women candidates.
• On an average, the past eleven Lok Sabhas in India have had only 30 or so women
MPs (below 6 per cent). In the upper house, the Rajya Sabha, their share has been
only marginally better at 9 per cent. The situation in the state assemblies is worse
than these two, with the figure standing at an average of 4 per cent in the last half
century.
• Despite the State’s commitment (and that of virtually all political parties) to the
Women’s Reservation Bill which promises one third representation to women in
parliament, the Bill has yet to be tabled for discussion and while parties have made
a commitment on paper, most have done their best to resist the introduction of this
Bill in reality.

Caste Prejudice

• The status of Dalit women in the country is a cause for shame as it tells a story of
unmitigated oppression, prejudice and exploitation of the most dehumanised nature.
• As a result of this Dalit women are malnourished, overworked, suffer morbidity,
and are victimized by a number of forces. They lack access to resources, despite
the fact that they form the backbone of the country’s agricultural workforce.
• Dalit women suffer a triple alienation: of class, of gender and of caste and
patriarchy. They suffer widespread social ostracism by being branded as
untouchables, which denies them access to natural resources such as drinking
water, community land etc.

Human rights of women

Commitment

• Promote and protect the human rights of women, through the full implementation
of all human rights.
• Ensure equality and non-discrimination under the law and in practice.
• Achieve legal literacy
Gaps

Discriminatory legislation still exists, and family, civil and penal codes are still not
fully gender sensitive. Legislative and regulatory gaps persist, perpetuating de jure as well
as de facto inequality and discrimination. Women have insufficient access to the law, due
to lack of legal literacy and resources, insensitivity and gender bias of low enforcement
officials and the judiciary, and the persistence of traditional and stereotypical attitudes.

• Notwithstanding the increase in the number of laws, conventions (both national and
international) the violation of women’s human rights continues unabated in India.
• Nodal governmental bodies formed for the protection and monitoring of human
rights like the National Human Rights Commission must as a rule (mandatory)
include one women member on their commission. The rules governing such
appointment need to be reviewed with a view to facilitating more women to qualify
for the same: Restrictive rules can prevent the right member from being appointed
and thereby reduce the rule of appointment of a woman member to mere
‘tokenism’.
• Violence of human rights of women of specific groups like the dalit, indigenous
(tribal) and minority have taken place and these should be seen and addressed as
human rights violations and stringent action taken against the perpetrators.
• Laws require review and amendment and need to be framed with a view to
securing, promoting and enforcing women’s human rights at all levels of public &
private spheres.

The enactment of legislation on prevention of domestic violence to women to

address the wide-spread problem of domestic violence against women and to create an
institution of Protection officers for protection of women from domestic violence is still
pending for approval. Similarly the Bill on sexual harassment of women at work place is
not introduced as promised and amendments provide for strengthen the National
Commission on Women received the same fate. The review of amendments of various
legislations are still pending at various stages.

I. Women and the media

Commitment

• Increase and participation and access of women to expression and decision-making

in and through the media and new technologies of communication.
• Promote a balanced and non-stereotyped portrayal of women in media.

Gaps
 Women are still not employed in sufficient numbers in key decision-making
positions to influence media policy. Negative images of women, stereotyped portrayals
and pornography have increased in some places, and some journalists remain biased
against women. The field of information and communication technologies is based on
male norms and Western culture. Development of and access to Internet infrastructure is
limited, and depends on political will, cooperative efforts and financial resources.

The girl-child
Commitment

• Eliminate all forms of discrimination against the girl-child.

• Eliminate negative cultural attitudes and practices against girls.
• Promote and protect the rights of the girl-child and increase awareness of her needs
and potential.
• Eliminate discrimination against girls in education, skills development and training.
• Eliminate discrimination against girls in health and nutrition.
• Eliminate the economic exploitation of child labour and protect young girls at
work.
• Eliminate violence against the girl-child.
• Promote the girl-child’s awareness of and participation in social, economic and
political life.
• Strengthen the role of the family in improving in the status of the girl-child.

Gaps

Traditional discriminatory attitudes against women and girls and inadequate

awareness of the specific situation of the girl child, where, for example, domestic
responsibilities often prevent her from pursuing her education, contributed to a lack of
opportunities for girl children to become self-reliant and independent. Programmes were
hindered by a lack of financial and human resources, statistical data disaggregated by sex
and technical capacity. There were few established national mechanisms to implement
policies and programmes for the girl child.