ECONOMIC PROGRESS, CONSUMERISM AND GENDER EQUALITY

GENDER EQUALITY – A NATURAL PREREQUISITE
It has been said by Jawaharlal Nehru that the condition of a country can be told by looking at the status of its women. The progress that a country makes depends to a significant extent on the condition of its women.

Generally speaking, since women form half of the human population in any society the magnitude to which women and girls benefit from development policies and programs naturally has a significant influence on the nation’s overall development success. In the industries, whether small, medium or large-scale females are disciplined, dedicated, and hard workers; they are respectful of authority and do not give rise to problems of violent nature that vitiate industrial harmony due to deliberate insubordination. Women thus are significant contributors to industrial productivity and economic growth of a nation.

The health of a nation depends upon the well-being of its families. Women contribute directly to this cause by investing their earnings in their offspring and by shouldering crucial and decisive life-sustaining responsibilities so necessary for the existence and prosperity of her family. Women’s empowerment has a positive bearing on the demographics of a nation as she realizes the economic negatives of raising a huge family and thus chooses wisely in limiting the number of children she might like to have; this has a direct and positive effect on environmental sustainability.

WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT IN INDIA
The process of empowerment of women in India started with the education and awareness of their rights in the 19th century; this genesis of women’s self-awareness is an exhaustive subject which deserves a separate tome, and cannot be discussed in great details here. But the names of those reformists who kick-started the evolution of the modern Indian woman at a time when she was literally suffocating in a male-dominated oppressive society are: - Lord William Cavendish Bentinck who abolished sati, Madhav Govinda Ranade, who founded the Widow Re-marriage Association and the Deccan Education Society (which sought to increase young women's educational facilities), Pandita Ramabai – the first Indian feminist, the social reform movement of Maharashtra which included stalwarts like Maharshi Dhondo Keshav Karve, Jyotiba Phule, Behramji Malbari, Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur, Karmaveer Bhaurao Paigonda Patil, etc. By actively involving women in the political movement of the Indian Freedom Struggle, Mahatma Gandhi laid down the foundations of a process for future self conscious Indian feminism. It has to be said that the intervening Second World War also paved the way for greater involvement of women in employment and as Indian families experienced the advantages of having women in the family earn money, social prejudices against their gainful employment weakened. Over the years, the idea of a ‘second income’ as the means for a better standard of life for the family came to be fairly well established. Today, if one were to look in the matrimonial columns on the internet as well as in the print media it becomes pretty much obvious that most of the prospective brides are handsomely employed.

The Indian woman today is as actively involved in the progress of the country as her male compatriots. Here are certain facts which show how far the Indian woman has progressed from her oppressive patriarchal surroundings: -

• India has the world’s largest number of professionally qualified women.

• India has more female doctors, surgeons, scientists and professors than the United States.

• India has more working women than any other country in the world. This includes female workers at all levels of skill – from the surgeon and the airline pilot to bus conductors and menial labourers.

The journey of empowerment for the Indian woman has been impressive indeed, we even had a woman prime minister and several women chief-ministers; but the quest is far from over and in a country of over 1 billion people with many orthodox and conservative socio-religious structures it will take some more effort for this journey to attain its fruitful goals. The Government has on its part since some time now established a National Human Rights Commission for Women that handles all human rights violations against women. Also, there is a National Council for Women that advocates policy for Women. There is an entire ministry for women that formulates and implements policy for them. However, the women’s bill which seeks to reserve a certain percentage of seats in Parliament for women is pending since 1998 and has sadly become a political football!

REGRESSIVE TENDENCIES
The very need for empowering women in India tells you that despite her quest towards emancipation and self-sufficiency, on an average, women in India are still socially, politically and economically weaker than men. There is in the Indian society an animus towards the female child. A recent article in the British medical Journal Lancet stated that since 1994, over 1 crore-10 million foetuses have been aborted in our country. No wonder then, that in some Indian states particularly in the north the number of females per 1000 males has been plummeting since decades and has reached the mid 800s. It would be a mistake to assume that people participating in such heinous abortions are all illiterate, ignorant villagers. These people also are well educated influential businessmen and professionals, and belong to upper income levels and are desperate for a male heir even at the cost of 2-3 abortions of successive female foetuses! It is not as if it required an article in Lancet to make us aware of this cruel/perverse social state of mind, an Indian film maker Manish Jha even made a realistic film titled Matrubhoomi(A Nation Without Women) in 2003, portraying the effects of the immoral tradition of female infanticide on a small Indian village. There is very little that any law can achieve when people are determined by hook or crook to get rid of the female child by foeticide and if that is not possible by female infanticide!

Under the fundamentalist garb of defending tradition and cultural identity women’s rights have been trampled upon wherever easily possible and most surprisingly political parties at the centre of power have also got involved in such wanton moral policing. The demonisation and banning of bar dance girls, in a sudden bout of new found moral fanaticism has left in the lurch 80,000 female entertainers and countless waiters, bouncers, bartenders, chefs, janitors and other support staff that are directly or indirectly employed in the licensed business. A conservative estimate puts the number of jobless from this heartless and legally unsound drive at one million and all this in an age of “reforms with a human face”.

Whether the conservative or orthodox political thought amongst us likes it or not Sex is a human need and prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. It would be wishful thinking to see prostitution vanish by merely declaring it illegal in the name of morality. In the British times prostitution was legal and licensed. Legalising a profession allows you to reform it and have a control over it. In the name of bogus ‘prudish Indian womanhood’ the governments post-independence made prostitution illegal and thus lost an opportunity to reform and streamline the prostitution industry so that it could have brought in revenue to the Government; the sex industry is not to be berated or scoffed at! A healthy well managed and strictly regulated sex industry can serve as a barrier against the spread of HIV infections, Sexually transmitted diseases and bring in much needed revenue by the virtue of its stimulus to the tourism industry. Las Vegas, Amsterdam, Bangkok and Pattaya are ideal examples of well managed sex industry cum tourist spots.

The fundamentalist opinion in the Government machinery not only prevents the much needed legalization of this unacknowledged vital service sector but baulks at the erotic nature of HIV propaganda and wants to make it more ‘acceptable’; remember how the immensely successful Balbir Pasha AIDS advertisements were simply discontinued and replaced by watered down campaigns that simply did not carry the message with any degree of conviction or effectiveness. Such people would like to help you believe that procreation occurs through eye-contact! Wearing sunglasses would then become a logical step in the battle against AIDS! Incidentally, the Planning Commission of India has recently suggested the legalization of prostitution as a strategy towards battling AIDS.


HOPE IN ECONOMIC RENEWAL AND GROWTH
Growth is a great leveler; it has the capacity to remove political, social, and economic inequalities among various groups of people including the two genders, man and woman.
Growth can be boosted internally by as well as externally by reforms in taxes, transport, banking, insurance, power, labour, in fact in every sector. It is not uncommon to see women entrepreneurs like for example, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw of Biocon Ltd these days blossoming in an atmosphere which is much economically liberalized than before. Even our domestic innovative growth ideas like the Amul model which is based on village milk cooperatives involving 600,000 families and 57,000 milk collection centres involves village women who have become business-savvy. For example a woman who owns four cows would deposit the milk at the collection centre, and then go to an Internet cafe to check the Internet for what prices she could get for the milk the next day!

One must not lose heart, the social prejudice against the female child which has always been inherent in our society will have to go one day and go it will! Even an eternal pessimist will not deny that! As the process of liberalization progresses more venues will open up for our sisters in various sectors of the economy. The process of opening up of the Indian economy in the nineties generated jobs in great numbers in the services sector like IT and in the call centres. A substantial number of the employees in these sectors are women.


THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT
Future Indian governments elected on the votes of India’s youthful electorate will logically have to hasten the process of integrating India’s economy with that of the world. As India opens to the world (a process which has already begun) backward anachronistic practices will have to and will fade out. And just as in the WW II period, the Indian woman will take her final steps towards emancipation from gender discrimination as well as the animus towards her being born. Education and economic liberalisation will induce the much needed growth that will act as a catalyst in bringing about a silent social revolution that will bridge the gender gap and eliminate incongruous and misplaced structures of “culture”, “morality” and “identity” which provide the tinder to ideologically bankrupt forces to feed upon. Growth due to its welcome leveling influence will in turn unleash the nation’s full consumer potential.
-Dr. V. R.Shenoy