Women worse off in India than in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka

India ranks lower than its poorer South Asian neighbours Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka on gender development because of lower life expectancy among women and a wide gap between the incomes of men and women, according to the UN’s annual human development report.

Updated on: Jul 24, 2014, 23:58:52 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India ranks lower than its poorer South Asian neighbours Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka on gender development because of lower life expectancy among women and a wide gap between the incomes of men and women, according to the UN’s annual human development report released on Thursday.

Pakistan is the only country in the region that scored lower than India on the Gender Development Index (GDI) introduced for the first time in the flagship Human Development Report (HDR), which is carefully watched by governments and policy-makers across the world.

The index ranked India 132 out of 148 countries on the gender development index based on average years schooling, life expectancy at birth and gross per capita national income, even lower than poor African countries such as Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The numbers suggest that higher economic growth does not lead to social empowerment of all.

“The indicators show that south Asia lags behind even sub-Saharan Africa ... the countries need to institutionalise mechanisms to ensure that even women get their due,” the report said.

The report found that the per capita income of men in India is about four times higher than that of women while Bangladeshi men earn twice as much as women and men in Nepal are paid about 80% more.

India also scores lower on gender development because of lower education levels of women. Only about one-fourth of women reach high school while more than half of the country’s men make it to the same level. The report found political participation of women in India is also lower than some South Asian countries, with just 10% of parliamentary seats held by women compared with one-fifth in Nepal and Bangladesh.

India’s overall ranking in the index remained unchanged at 135 out of 187 countries.

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

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