2023-09-20 21:01:36
A victory after several failures in recent decades. The lower house of the Indian Parliament on Wednesday approved the bill which will reserve a third of the seats of deputies for women. With only two votes against, the bill passed almost unanimously. Since the last national elections, out of 788 Indian MPs, only 104 are women, or just over 13%, according to government figures.
These figures reflect a broader underrepresentation of women in Indian public life. Last year, India’s labor force was comprised of just under a third of working-age women, according to government data. Passage to the upper house is practically guaranteed thanks to the broad political support the project enjoys. It will then need the approval of half of the 28 Indian states.
Several other Asian countries apply a quota policy
The quota can only be applied once Indian electoral districts have been redrawn following the immense undertaking of enumerating 1.4 billion inhabitants. Scheduled for 2021, it had to be postponed indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic. The bill was first introduced in 1996, failing to obtain a majority of votes in Parliament as in each of the six attempts to pass it since. Over the years, the bill has encountered strong opposition from some political parties in the north of the country.
The world’s largest democracy was the second country in the world to appoint a woman prime minister in the person of Indira Gandhi in 1966, six years after Sri Lanka’s Sirimavo Bandaranaike, but the current proportion of female MPs is among the lowest in the world. ‘Asia. Several Asian countries have laws setting a quota of parliamentary seats for women, including India’s neighbors Nepal and Bangladesh.
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