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.

How India's women are becoming a powerful political force ahead of polls

A record 65.3 per cent of India's 260 million women voters cast a ballot in the 2014 polls that swept Modi to the biggest parliamentary majority in three decades.

Lok Sabha Elections 2019 : To see how India’s women are becoming a powerful political force ahead of next month’s election, look no further than Neelam Kumari and her bright yellow van.

The 35-year-old living in one of India’s poorest states bought the vehicle with a Rs 600,000 ($8,400) loan from a government program, allowing her to earn Rs 14,000 a month ferrying children to a nearby school. She gives the credit—and plans to give her vote—to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“My son and the other kids in our village wouldn’t have gone to an English school if not for this loan,” Kumari said from her dusty village in Bihar, a state that is crucial to Modi’s bid to win another five-year term. Five other women in nearby villages now own vans like hers, and they also back Modi.

Kumari is among 56.3 million rural women—equivalent to the population of Italy—who have received small loans worth about $27 billion since Modi took office in 2014. They could help swing the next election in May: Female voters are becoming an increasingly potent constituency in a nation where crimes against them regularly stir global outrage.

A record 65.3 per cent of India’s 260 million women voters cast a ballot in the 2014 polls that swept Modi to the biggest parliamentary majority in three decades. In most states, female turnout has surpassed males in recent ballots. And that is now starting to produce real change: Modi’s government has raised expenditure on sanitation and education for girls, provided safer cooking fuels and instituted the death penalty for rapists.

“In 2019, Modi sees women as an important demographic that can help power the party’s reelection,” said Milan Vaishnav, South Asia director at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The BJP believes that women will reward the party for their welfare delivery schemes.”

The loan program is called Aajeevika (it translates to livelihood), and it was started in the 1990s as a local poverty alleviation program for women’s groups in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. It was adopted country-wide in 2011 under the Congress-led government that Modi ousted three years later.

Once in power, Modi expanded Aajeevika to 622 of India’s 640 districts and increased annual outlays by about three times. The federal government makes funds available and local governments oversee implementation—a task made relatively easier with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and allies ruling 16 of India’s 28 states.

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