Indian Women: One Dishonourable Step Backwards
HOW should one judge the lot of women in India, a country that is in many ways progressive, modern, tolerant and yet by turns repressive and hostile? Women hold the highest political positions (the presidency, speaker of parliament, leader of the ruling party, leader of the opposition in parliament, several chief ministers of large states) and in theory they are protected by a variety laws promoting equality.
Though development indicators remain dire, just about all statistics show their lives improving. Women are more literate than ever (last year’s census suggests two-thirds of them can read, compared with fewer than two-fifths in 1991). They are becoming less likely to die in childbirth (well under half the rate of 1990). And they live much longer: at 66 years, India’s female life expectancy outstrips the male one by some three years. Like men, on average they live in better homes than they did in previous years, with more access to health care and schools, telephones and transport.
Yet weigh against such trends the dismal persistence of discrimination, violence and other forms of hostility against girls and women. A cultural preference for boys, combined with modern technology such as ultrasound scanners, allows parents to identify and abort unwanted female fetuses at a terrifying rate. Millions of girls are missing from the demographic norm. Despite laws against sex-selective abortion (or even finding out the sex of your unborn child), in many places the child sex-ratio is growing dangerously skewed.