Indian Sawaal-My India, My Views

Women Reservation bill crossed its first hurdle by getting passed in voting in rajyasabha. Now it has to get passed in loksabha.

Opinions are severely divided on would it actually serve the purpose ?. Won’t it be misused ?.

There are some important and interesting points which India has been debating of woman reservation bill.

There are lot of people who agree that mere 8-9 percentage of women in parliament is pathetic situation and more representation is needed. Research too have concluded that women in parliaments , assemblies are helpful in formation of policies which do address child , woman and family issues. Like in panchayat women are concerned with water , sewage , cleanliness , vaccination , urinals while men are concerned about market development , irrigation and roads. These are generals and not specific , men can be more concerned about water and women about roads too .

But is reservation the only way to bring women in parliament? . Won’t this provision be misused?. Does reservation actually help?

Well coming to this being misused , initially it is likely to be misused and there is little doubt about it. 33% of loksabha members and state assembly members would have to vacate their seats and they would try their best to get their wives,daugthers, daughter in laws to occupy these seats . In some cases they would be actual remote controlling authority.

Coming to does reservation help?. We have reservation on basis of caste , has it helped to serve the purpose. Answer is yes and no. It has helped first generation of those who got reservation and then even after becoming well off , these people continued using reservation for their sons and daughters. So it becomes schedule caste v/s schedule caste where a candidate who has good economic background competes with a candidate who doesnot have comfort of tutions and even at times has to earn his living.

Now in case of women reservation bill. Would it help?. If one sees overall status of woman in India , even is rising India status of woman is not good. Here are some of figures which might be real shocker for some :

1) In India every half an hour a woman is molested or raped or abused
2) In 20 years 2 million Females child were killed (female foeticide)
3) WHO rates health issues of south asian woman as in emergency mode with most of women are malnourished.
4) According to united nations two-third of married women in India were victims of domestic violence.
5) Averagely 5000 dowry deaths are reported every year

Now above are just few stats . WOMEN RESERVATION BILL wont change this over night , neither it gurantees to change how India operates specially in case of its woman but the above stats does reflect that how our society considers its women and how much it would be ready to send women to parliaments or assemblies or even vote for them. That explains why we have so less number of woman in politics and so less are self made in politics. While maya , mamta, ambika soni are examples of self made politicians , sonia gandhi , indira gandhi , Supriya Sule are example of politicians on basis of where they married or were born.

Ideally women should be sent to parliament not on basis of reservation but merit and for that more focus should be made to educate woman and empower them . But thats about IDEALs and government chooses to use mode of reservation to achieve purpose of getting more representation of woman in parliament and assemblies.

Does reservations help. Well only time will tell this.