Everybody loves to talk about women empowerment, but in reality it continues to elude the fairer sex, says Premlata Singh, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA from Uchana Kalan constituency in Haryana.
“It takes courage to come out of the shell and break the ceiling glass and a very small number of women have been doing it over the years,” she told The Hindu .
Ms. Premlata Singh is wife of a Haryana Cabinet Minister Chowdary Birender Singh, one of the tallest leaders of the BJP in that state. She says that after identifying education as the key factor that could lead to all-round development of women, the Haryana Government introduced a series of new programmes aimed at uplifting the fairer sex.
Bold steps
“We have taken some very bold steps. Bringing change at the grass roots level, the Government has made education mandatory for candidates seeking to contest panchayat elections in villages. To become a sarpanch of a village, one must be educated, in case of SC/ST candidate, a woman candidate must be at least 5th pass and male candidate 8th class. Other conditions say that the candidate should be debt-free, no electricity bill should be pending against him/her and he/she must have a bathroom in the house,” she informs.
Ms. Singh says the Opposition Congress and Lok Dal tried to scuttle the government move by approaching the court of law “but we won the legal battle”. The government now gives funds directly to the sarpanches. “If they are not educated, it will be impossible for them to maintain record of what they are doing,” she says.
The thrust, she says, is on transparency to ensure a corruption-free administration. Referring to the Haryana Civil Services (HCS), she says the results were pending for two years. “But we saw to it that all the impediments were removed.”
To achieve ‘Education for all’, the State has opened 20 new colleges besides the existing ones. “The idea is to have one college at a distance of every 20 km across the State,” she says.
