Inclusive Agenda

Dedicate the Decade to Women

Seven decades of Federal Republic made India sterner stuff. Optimists invariably look at the half full glass while pessimists see the other half that is empty. But in the other half lie the challenges and opportunities. This retrospect becomes necessary in the backdrop of the latest Oxfam Report on Inequality released on the eve of Davos World Economic Conference that just concluded, putting India in somewhat bad light.

India always proved its might and solidarity in every type of crisis. From Bengal famine and pestilence to fighting Pakistan, from Bhuj earthquake to Tsunami, continual floods of Brahmaputra, Ganges, and Godavari the huge diversity of the nation did not come in the way of overcoming all the crises.

India’s growth and poverty reduction with by far the second largest population in the world, has contributed even to reducing global inequality. Famous economist Surjit S. Bhalla is the first to differ from the international wisdom and establish that ‘if poor defined as fraction of population in 1980, then for each 10% rise in consumption by the non-poor, consumption by the poor rose by 18%. Millennium Development Goals (headcount ratio) target of less than 15% poor by 2015 was reached quite ahead and only 10% of the developing world was poor. Such reduction, however, has no parity when it came to reduction of inequalities.

World Development Report 2000/2001 mentioned: the average income in the richest 20 countries is 37 times the average in the poorest 20 – a gap that doubled in the previous 40 years.

Union and State Governments have independently and together evolved schemes benefitting the poor and absolute poverty in India declined substantially. Poverty levels have gone down in India from 50% in 1993-94 to 23% in 2016-17 in rural areas and in urban areas correspondingly from 32% to 13%. The unrecognized fact is that even rural infrastructure in terms of roads constitute 72% of the road length of the country. These developments need not lead us to complacence as there is lot more ground to cover.

Oxfam Report 2020 highlighted two aspects: the gap between the rich and the poor and even among poor, gender inequality. 2153 persons had more wealth than 4.6bn people. Report on India omits to mention the political constituency that is full of billionaires. If the perverse subsidy regime has to be reversed, it should start from this constituency in favour of poor women of the country.

The wide divergence is attributed however to the underpaid and unpaid care work of women in homes. The Report patently ignored the intangible contribution of women in India – a culture of caring for home and bringing up the family to prosperity.

V.V. Giri, the fourteenth child of the family became the President of India and he married a SC woman who was also a poet. While this is not to mention that there was virtue in big family, upbringing of the child to the expectation of the Mother is still sacred in many a Indian home. Mother is the first teacher in the home. Monetising her ‘care’ is the value she creates for the human resource.

During the last three decades, influenced by globalization and imbibing western culture, the otherwise high value and culture of Indian youth suffered such care. Indian women demonstrated in the past a unique balance between home and work, whether in rural or urban areas. This balancing act is at the core of the ‘care’. The feminist and human values argued by the Oxfam report needs a relook at least in India. It is not right to belittle the role of Mother.

My Mother, who gave birth to six sons and six daughters, though studied only class V, studied the Indian epics Mahabharat and Ramayana, Bhagavatham and Bhagavadgita apart from several books in Telugu literature and learnt English with her children. She always used to say with pride that her contribution to the GDP of the country was substantial and lay in the NRI remittances of her two sons who went abroad and the grandchildren working in the Information Technology sector abroad, her other sons and daughters traveling throughout India at different points of time in the year either on leisure holiday or pilgrimage. The progeny of my parents is 100 and half of them are working in different parts of the globe. She brought us up when my father started his income at Rs.23 per month in 1936 of British India to Rs.250 per month on the day of retirement in 1974!!

Measuring women’s contribution to India’s GDP terming as one of the lowest in the world at 17% needs correction as GDP hides more than what is revealed. The issue, it rightly says, at one point is not just limited to women’s participation in the workforce alone.

Violence against women is another aspect that has been widely reported both in the Report and outside. There is also regional difference and across the castes in such reports. Dalit women were invariably the target and mostly in northern and western India compared to the rest of India.

Villagers invariably debate on the need for girls getting engaged in wedding at the age of 15-16 to provide security to them. It is not so much the unpaid care work of women that is the source of violence and to support such argument citing Krishnaraj report of 1990-91 EPW is perhaps a travesty of the current trend.

During the last three decades, self-help group movement has substantially gained traction in empowering women economically. Economic empowerment for sure is the best way of providing sustainable intervention in women development.

Of course, what needs correction certainly is to make sure that ‘40% of 15-18 year-old-girls go to school. Empowering women will be empowering the nation. It is this context that calls for reservation to women in every field to move to one-third of the population irrespective of caste or creed in the place of all existing reservations. Once this happens, women in SCs, STs, backward castes, and OBCs will automatically fall in the reserved category and would rectify the societal imbalance. If this decade is dedicated to women, 71^st Republic Day 2020 will write the future history differently.

*The Author is an economist and the views are personal. Published in Telangana Today on 25.01.2020