While the Women's Reservation Bill is expected to hit the bumps in the Lok Sabha, the reality is ever so alarming. Empowerment and adequate representation may remain subjects of fashionable discourse among the social glitterati for a long while yet. India has been posited in the bottom rungs of the Gender Gap Index Report 2009, a critical document prepared by the World Economic Forum. The year is at once significant and ironical. A couple of months before the political grandstanding that marked the passage of the Bill in the Rajya Sabha, the country had slid down by one slot from the position it had attained in 2008. It has scored only in the decidedly political parameter of "years with female head". At the No. 4 slot, the country owes it to the Indira Gandhi dispensation and, if to a far, far lesser degree, to Pratibha Patil's presidency. Not to put too fine a point on it, it ranks among the worst in the segments that are close to the bone. The reality leaves little or no scope for pretentious cant, still less for the misplaced bonhomie of the Brinda Karat-Sushma Swaraj variety. A woman President, Speaker of the Lok Sabha, Foreign Secretary and a couple of chief ministers are essentially individual success stories. Their achievements can scarcely mirror the overwhelming backwardness that is the subtext of this report of global interest.
Despite the existence of a union ministry that is expected to take care of both, the development of the woman has been no less distressing than that of the child. India would appear to have stumbled on all the vital parameters ~ economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment and health and survival. In other words, the Gender Gap Index Report has covered the fundamentals of existence. Equally fundamental must be the disconnect when one reflects that tiny Iceland is head and shoulders above an emergent global power that boasts its rising GDP graph. So it is that Iceland occupies the top pedestal while the dominance of Finland and Sweden has been reaffirmed. Still more embarrassing for the Indian establishment and the political class must be the finding that South Africa and Lesotho have been included in the Top Ten for having made dramatic progress in closing the gender gap. India has been placed at 114 among 134 countries, confirming the hollowness of the quota regime.
