Data watch: Why India needs more women to contest 2019 Lok Sabha elections

The issue of women's representation in legislatures is gaining traction, as India gears up for its 17th general elections in April 2019.

Business Standard : India stood 149th in a 2019 list of 193 countries ranked by the percentage of elected women representatives in their national parliaments, trailing Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan and dropping three places since 2018.

The issue of women’s representation in legislatures is gaining traction, as India gears up for its 17th general elections in April 2019: Congress chief Rahul Gandhi has promised 33% reservation for women in the parliament and state assemblies if his party comes to power; the Biju Janata Dal in Odisha will field women candidates in 33% of Lok Sabha seats; and 41% of nominees in the list of candidates released by Bengal’s Trinamool Congress are women.

There are 66 women MPs in Lok Sabha (parliament’s lower house), occupying 12.6% of its 524 seats, while the world average was 24.3% on January 1, 2019).

In more than six decades till 2014, as women’s share in India’s population remained at 48.5%, the share of women MPs increased eight percentage points to 12.6% between the first (1952) and the 16th Lok Sabha (2014). There was one woman MP for about eight million Indian women in 1952. By 2014 this was one for more than 9 million women--equivalent to the population of Austria.

Rwanda--currently ranked first in the world--has 49 women MPs in its 80-seat lower house or one woman MP for 111,000 females, according to data released on January 1, 2019 by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), a multilateral agency.

The share of women in national parliaments increased by nearly one percentage point to 24.3 per cent in 2018, noted IPU’s press statement on the yearly report released on March 5, 2019. The global share of women in parliament continues to rise; it stood at 18.3% in 2008 and 11.3% in 1995, the report noted.

In the list are 50 countries that held elections in 2018.

“More women in parliament means better, stronger and more representative democracies that work for all the people,” said IPU president and Mexican MP, Gabriela Cuevas Barron, in a press release. “The 1% increase we saw in 2018 represents a small improvement on women's parliamentary representation. This means we are still a long way to achieving global gender parity. For that reason, we urge for greater political will in adopting well-designed quotas and electoral systems that eliminate any legal barrier that might be hindering the opportunities for women to enter parliament.”

There are three African--Rwanda, Namibia and South Africa--and no Asian countries in the top 10 list of countries with significant female representation in parliaments, as on January 1, 2019.