Why India Needs More Women To Contest 2019 Elections - Poverty Action Lab

Why India Needs More Women To Contest 2019 Elections
  Shreehari Paliath, IndiaSpend

Published: Mar 15 2019, 4:31 AM
Last Updated: Mar 15 2019, 4:31 AM

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 President Rahul Gandhi has
promised 33 percent reservation for women in Parliament and state assemblies if his
party comes to power; the Biju Janata Dal in Odisha will field women candidates in 33
percent of Lok Sabha seats; and 41 percent of nominees in the list of candidates
released by West Bengal’s Trinamool Congress are women.

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

In more than six decades till 2014, as women’s share in India’s population remained
at 48.5 percent, the share of women MPs increased eight percentage points to 12.6
percent 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 nine 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 Jan. 1,
2019 by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, 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 percent in 2008 and 11.3 percent 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 percent 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 Jan. 1, 2019.

Female Representation In State Assemblies Even Lower Than Parliament
While female representation is low in the Lok Sabha, representation in state
assemblies is even lower. Over five years to 2017, female representation in state
assemblies was the highest in Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan (14 percent), according
to the 2017 data released by the ministry of statistics and programme
implementation. Mizoram, Nagaland and Puducherry had no elected women
representatives in their assemblies.

The national average of women in state assemblies and state councils (upper house of
the state legislatures) was 9 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

Low representation of women in the legislature can be traced to the patriarchal
structure of Indian politics, noted a January 2011 analysis by the Economic and Political
Weekly. Lack of reservation for women in Parliament and state assemblies,

unwillingness among political parties to give tickets to women, a general lack of
awareness of electoral politics among women and the lack of family support—these
were some of the specific reasons for the gender skew, the analysis had said

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