Reservation fails to give women a voice

According to a new survey, the route to empowerment of women through Panchayati Raj institutions has several stumbling blocks, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Apr 8, 2008, 01:11:01 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

The route to empowerment of women through Panchayati Raj (PR) institutions has several stumbling blocks a survey has shown. Caught in household chores, a majority of the women in PR institutions have little time to shoulder the responsibilities for which they were chosen.

Ironically, better-educated women steer clear of PR institutions, a new survey has found.

A survey on women in PR institutes in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh has found that most women are only figurative members of the panchayat. It's the men in their families who wield actual power. “The actual responsibilities were being shouldered by their family members, like husbands or father-in-laws. This indicates that women representatives have not gained their rightful place in the panchayats,” the survey conducted by Centre for Social Research and National Commission for Women said.

Indicating that women were not even empowered within families, the survey found that not even a single woman representative owned land or a house in her name. The families of about 66 per cent of these representatives owned more than 20 acres of land.

Another interesting finding of the survey was that only women from the poorer families and those who not highly-educated were coming to the Panchayati Raj institutions. Fifty-nine per cent of the women in PR institutes in Gujarat had primary-level education.

“Richer and more educated women in both states have stayed away from PR institutions,” the survey said.

In the absence of more educated women, the PR institution heads from the lower income groups and the marginalised sections of the society had to fight caste bias against them. "People in the village as well as the bureaucratic set up were biased towards these women, especially in Himachal Pradesh," the survey said.

Election of women at the gram panchayat level was more out of compulsion than choice. All the women interviewed in Gujarat and Himachal were first-time entrants, meaning most of them were getting elected from seats reserved for women.

In the Panchayati Raj institutions, about 33 per cent of the seats are reserved for women. The seats are reserved for women in rotational basis.

“While the reason for becoming a PR member by a large segment of women representatives (61.6 per cent) was reservation of women, only some women (24 per cent) mentioned they had done so because of their interest in social work,” the survey said.

Ranjana Kumari, director CSR, said that unless 33 per cent seats for women are reserved in legislatures and the Parliament sound participation of women at the grass roots level would be difficult. She urged the UPA government to bring in the legislation for reserving seats in legislatures and Parliament for women.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

Get the latest India News, breaking headlines and real-time updates from across the country. Stay informed about politics, government policies, crime, weather and major national developments.