Union Minister for Women and Child Development Smriti Irani addressed the United Nations General Assembly early on Friday morning on the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action to highlight India’s achievements in gender equality.
Minister Irani was among over 150 Prime Ministers, Presidents and Ministers who addressed the UNGA’s High-Level meeting held under the theme “Accelerating the realization of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls ”.
The High-Level meeting is an opportunity for Member States to demonstrate political will and leadership for the implementation of the Beijing Declaration — a resolution adopted on September 15, 1995 on the principles of gender equality.
Ms. Irani spoke about a shift in India “from a paradigm of women’s development to women-led development”, which is a theme that first found mention in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto ahead of the 2019 general elections.
“Several of our legislations, such as those pertaining to sexual harassment of women at workplace, protection of women from domestic violence, protection of children from sexual offences, and our criminal laws’ amendments, have been strong enablers of women empowerment and protection of children, especially girls, over the past six years,” Ms. Irani said.
She also mentioned reservation for women in local bodies such as the panchayat; the ‘ Beti Bachao Beti Padhao ’ scheme; and the linking “over 200 million women” with the formal banking system as efforts to ensure gender equality.
Talking about the government’s efforts to ensure the protection of women during the COVID-19 pandemic, she said, “The government of India took a series of measures for ensuring safety, security and well-being of women during the COVID pandemic. These included One Stop Centres providing medical, psychological, legal, police and shelter facilities under a common roof. Additionally, during the pandemic all efforts are being made to ensure community care for women, especially pregnant and lactating women and women in vulnerable situations.”
However, activists said the omissions on caste and religious divide, and domestic violence, were glaring in her speech.
“Different governments in the world today are pushing behind women’s agenda. There needs to be a conducive environment for these global agendas to work and ensure transformative changes,” said Ruth Manorama, Dalit women’s rights activist.
She added, “I want to ask how many women today are in decision-making roles. While Jan Dhan accounts give women ₹500, what about economic stability for women to ensure that they are able to turn this amount into ₹50,000? The omissions in the speech about religious and caste problems are also telling. The government should ensure that through education and quality curriculum, these retrograde thoughts that divide the society are removed.”
“The Minister in her speech says that women are half the population, but the lack of priority given to women’s needs and safety can be seen from the budget of the Ministry of Women and Child Development, where a mere 4% of the budget has been allocated towards services and empowerment of women, and prevention of crimes. There is a lack of acknowledgement of the challenges faced during the COVID-19 lockdown, such as the rise in domestic violence cases. At the grassroots level, we saw the inability of women to access counselling, medical, legal, shelter and other services since they were mostly non-functional and unavailable. Acknowledging the problem would be the first step towards a solution,” said founder-director of Swayam, an NGO based in Kolkata, which is also the secretariat for the Aman Network, a coalition of NGOs and individuals working on curbing domestic violence.
