By Jyotshna Pandit
Last summer, the Planning Commission had established the Working Group on Women’s Agency and Empowerment to focus on policy to accelerate the process started by the National Policy for the Empowerment of Women in 2001. The group has now published its report on the forthcoming Twelfth Plan, which will serve as a rough guide to policymaking for women over the next half- decade. A sensitive, intelligent document, it shifts the focus from the idea of empowerment which has characterised past plans to the cutting edge ideas of capabilities and freedoms promoted by the Chicago law theorist Martha Nussbaum and the Harvard welfare economist Amartya Sen.
If even a fraction of the report’s policy recommendations are acted upon, it would initiate systemic change in power relations and speedily end the subjugation of women. Stories about a couple of the recommendations have been appearing in dribs and drabs in the media, but the point that the coverage has missed is that they are cogs in a larger machine designed to change the very nature of Indian society for the better.
In the area of family law, the Dowry Prohibition Act is to be clarified and fresh clauses added to give this largely ineffectual law some teeth. Most controversial among them is the imposition of a ceiling on marriage costs according to the financial capacity of the parties involved.
This could have a beneficial effect on the poor, who usually have to bury themselves in debt to get their children married. At the same time, since the marriage of a child is a unique event and is conditioned by peer pressures, it could simply turn into a fresh revenue stream for the enforcement authorities as families encourage them to turn a blind eye.
That is what happens now. Neighbourhoods and communities always know who demands a dowry, who has given it, and how much, but cases seem to come to light only when the bride rebels and goes to the police — who knew what was going on all along. This tradition will probably continue, no matter how much the Act is strengthened.
More promising is a proposed standalone Right to Marital Property Act, applicable to all communities, which would define all moveable and immovable assets of a couple as joint property, irrespective of who acquired it, and specify that it should be split down the middle in the event of separation. This would prevent the destitution of the spurned wife, which is an everyday reality.
Destitution also owes to the denial of maintenance, and a review of the relevant laws would cure that. While the attitude of courts to estranged women and their children has improved considerably, inadequate maintenance is still ordered and husbands can avoid paying even that. Therefore, it is proposed to set maintenance automatically at a level which can pay for the lifestyle that a divorced woman and her children were accustomed to in the marital home. Further, maintenance cannot be withheld on the basis of the behaviour of the wife. The state is to be responsible for its collection and in the event of shortfalls, it should pay from a specially designated fund.
To equalise the power relations between men and women in the family, the signature of the mother, as the legal guardian of her children, is to be accepted by all bodies and institutions. In fact, since she is the primary carer, she is also to be regarded as the primary guardian — the first among two equals.
A similar equity initiative is to be taken in the domain of employment. By some estimates, women perform up to 80 per cent of work leading to agricultural production but since they do it on behalf of the family, it is unrecorded and wageless work, the same as housework.
Women are also productive in professions which are not formally regarded as work, such as making baskets, jaggery and preserves. It may be recalled that until Lijjat professionalised papad making and created a mass market, women’s activity in this multi-million dollar industry was not regarded as work.
To gain recognition for such work will be a slow process, but what can be done immediately is to ensure equal wages in the formal and informal sectors, where work and its value are more clearly defined.
It is therefore proposed to deploy trade unions for better monitoring and implementation of the Equal Remuneration Act of 1976. Unions are to be allowed to file complaints about cut- rate pay given to women and encouraged to spread their reach deep into the unorganised sector. Gender based inequalities in pay and opportunity which they detect are to be addressed by a re- energised government machinery for the implementation of the Act.
These are perhaps the most important proposals, relating as they do to family and finance, the most important markers of identity and dignity in modern society.
The other legal and policy measures proposed chiefly address the need for change in criminal law and procedure for the benefit of women. They range from the Bill to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace to measures against trafficking and for the care and support of victims, most of whom are girl children.
Pre- natal sex determination is to be made a punitively expensive crime and the availability of ultrasound equipment will be restricted.
Most salient among these provisions is a standalone law criminalising honour killings and the harassment of young people to restrict their marital choices. They are to be given safe havens and the glorification of honour is to be banned.
This sounds like a recipe for a farewell dinner to the age of Manu. It would dismay some sections of society which hold the sage’s text in reverence, though there is no evidence for its authenticity, nor any indication of whether it was a prescriptive or descriptive text — in short, of whether it described reality or expressed a yearning for a patriarchal utopia which had never existed. But reform would help to create a decent society and smooth over the harshness which characterises ours.
It would also serve the national economic interest, which perhaps explains why the working group which produced this document is located in the Planning Commission. It is well- known that an unequal society is hamstrung and limits its own growth. And if inequality is gender- based the family, the basic unit of production and progress, is crippled. India’s prospects depend entirely on its rate of growth, and we simply cannot afford to lose economic traction at this time.
No alibi plan panel’s Working Group shifts the focus from women empowerment to the cutting edge ideas of capabilities and freedoms INAV