WORKSHEET - DEMOCRACY AND EQUALITY (SOCIAL SCIENCE CLASS 10 )

Democracy in India has strengthened the claim for equal status and equal opportunities. Justify the statement.
OR
Dignity and equal treatment of women are necessary ingredients a democratic society. Justify the statement.

Pulling women into the economy isn’t a function of budget alone, but also policy design, political will.

Written by Rohini Pande for Indian Express
Updated: February 14, 2020

India continues to struggle to provide its women with equal opportunity. On international measures of gender equality, India scores low on women’s overall health and survival and ability to access economic opportunities. Since the woman’s economic engagement is related to her own and her family’s well-being, the continuing decline in rural women’s labour force participation is a cause for concern, and both affects and reflects these worrying gender gaps.

The Economic Survey acknowledged this and highlighted that the state should design policies that better involve women in the economy. It quoted the World Bank, noting that “no country can develop and achieve its full potential if half of its population is locked in non-remunerative, less productive and non-economic activities.”

Unfortunately, when it came to allocating funds, the budget relegated women’s economic participation to secondary importance. Many agricultural, social programmes and female-focused initiatives received little attention and were ultimately dismissed to the “aspirational, but not practical” list.

Ignoring India’s declining female labour force participation at a time of economic distress is a mistake. Involving women in the economy is not a social cause — it is a source of efficiency gains and economic growth. In a country where young women’s education is now at par with men’s, ignoring that half of the population isn’t participating equally in the economy means we are missing out on innovation, entrepreneurship, and productivity gains.

The large potential increases in GDP that could accrue to India and countries around the world, if they could only close their labour force gender gaps, are often cited. A report by McKinsey Global Institute suggests that if women participated in the Indian economy at the level men do, annual GDP could be increased by 60 per cent above its projected GDP by 2025. This striking figure undoubtedly rests on a variety of assumptions. But the underlying conclusion is that women’s potential to contribute to GDP is huge. The same analysis also suggested that India’s potential GDP gains through achieving economic gender parity were larger than gains in any of the other regions they studied.

So, in the absence of significantly large budgetary allocations for women-targeted programmes, how can the state be responsive to women? An important focus could be smarter policy and gender-intentional implementation. A key example comes from MGNREGA, a programme whose official policy has long been to pay individual workers in their own bank accounts. When we examined the programme in Madhya Pradesh in 2013, we saw that this policy was typically not implemented, and that women’s wages were usually being paid into the bank account of the woman’s husband (the household head).