HT G20 Agenda: Women-led progress a key G20 agenda for India, says Irani

New Delhi Prime Minister Narendra Modi has ensured that women-led development has taken centre stage with regard to India’s G20 presidency while stressing that women become equal partners in the country’s development story, Union women and child development minister Smriti Irani said on Monday.

Irani was addressing a Hindustan Times event on “Women-led development”, part of a series of events HT is hosting on India’s G20 agenda.

“You would be a bit flummoxed that women-led development as an agenda is yet to find a home at the UN. Because for decades now, it has been perceived that women need to be emancipated; that we need to be at the receiving end of tools. We are those who are subjugated and need governments across the world to always rescue us,” Irani said.

“However, we should give credit to Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has ensured that women-led development remains centre stage with regard to India’s G20 presidency. For the first time, we have a head of the government who says we want to ensure women are equal partners in India’s development journey because we women can rescue parts of our economy when given leadership roles,” she said. “I think that the tectonic shift as to how women are to be perceived within democracies and economies is a big contribution already.”

The time has come to recognise women are not victims, the Union minister said. “We are sources of empowerment in every segment of society. So I think that is a very big change that has already happened in terms of the G20 narrative and agenda,” she said.

Speaking about India’s position in the Global Gender Gap Index, Irani said she had recently engaged with the team of the World Economic Forum and discussed the factors with regard to Indian women that never find space in such indices.

“We have close to 1.1 or 1.2 million women who are elected to panchayats across the country, but they never get counted as politically empowered women in the Global Gender Gap. We have women who get elected to legislative assemblies and yet never get counted. Women who become ministers in state governments never get counted. Women who get elected to Parliament or become members of the council of ministers don’t get counted. There are millions of women in our country who are politically empowered, but find absolutely no voice in the Global Gender Gap index report,” she said.

“Imagine you have a huge women force who are politically and administratively empowered in your country, but on global platforms, it seems they have no identity, they have no agency,” she added.

Emphasising the government’s initiatives to ensure gender equality at the workplace, the Union minister referred to the Mudra loan scheme and said 70% of the 37 crore (370 million) beneficiaries under the scheme are women.

“Post Mudra, women from rural areas and urban slums made a business plan, went to the bank for a loan, serviced it and return the loan. It is a huge social change that was not spoken of,” she said. “When did we last discuss women in small homes and poor families making business plans and going to the banks?”

It means, Irani said, that women already knew they needed a financial instrument of linkages to established financial institutions. “They knew how to leverage it. They only wanted somebody to step up and give them access…,” she added.

The WCD minister emphasised the need to bring technology in regional and Indian languages to bridge the gendered digital divide in India. “While the government has announced the PLI scheme to ensure mobile devices are manufactured in our country, that part of our challenge is being addressed. However, the larger challenge is how many women are participative in the divide now because of lack of access to technology in the language that they understand,” she said.

Speaking about participation of women in relief work during the Covid-19 pandemic, Irani said there was a conversation in the West that 80% of women in India were subjected to domestic violence and that even vaccination would be prejudiced in the country. “These narratives were internationalised, but they don’t take into consideration the true nature of what had happened in my country. In my country, six million women made efforts to bring people to the medical care, which never gets spoken about. Six million women is not a small number. They went from one house to another, collecting samples and delivering medicines. They went from one house to another, helping women in pregnancies,” she said. “However, there were fears professed by countries that don’t even have 10 million people.”

She added: “I don’t deny that women get disenfranchised during challenges, but it is the same for men as well. The agency of women can only be empowered without demeaning men and that would be gender justice.”

Talking about the existing gap in computing the impact of climate change on women and children, the minister said: “Today when we talk about climate change, lot of conversation focus on climate finance. But there is absolutely no conversation around what is the rescue framework for women and children when there is a climate calamity. I think that during the G20 conversations, we focus not only on relief and rehabilitation, but also restoration and put women at the centre while aiming to save families from climate change. When you save women in the families, you actually help restore communities at a faster pace.”