Ensuring boys don't transform INTO BRUTES

Even as crimes against girls and women are rising, galloping internet connectivity and adolescents becoming addicted to social media have unleashed a new wave of patriarchy and misogyny against women worldwide. Against this backdrop, it's become very important for parents to inculcate gender egalitarian attitudes in male children from earliest age

- KIRAN BALIMANE & CYNTHIA JOHN

Gender equality is a major precept of the Constitution of India whose platinum jubilee (75th anniversary) was recently celebrated with great pomp and ceremony. And rightly so because with Mahatma Gandhi's encouragement and under his leadership, women discharged a major even if insufficiently publicized, role in wresting India's independence after almost two centuries of imperial rule.

Yet even as hyper-nationalists across the political spectrum and subscribing to all ideologies proclaim India's progress and its emergence as the fourth largest economy worldwide, women constitute only 9-14 percent of the membership of Parliament and state legislative assemblies; a mere 27 percent of directors in corporate India are women, and women constitute a mere 6 percent of the officer corps in the defence services. On a wider canvas, in terms of female participation in labour force (FPLF), India's 41.7 percent is below the global average of 48 percent and way below China (63 percent) and Vietnam (69 percent).

The World Bank has estimated that if women's participation in the workforce were to reach 50 percent, India could boost its annual GDP growth by 1.5 percentage points. Christine Lagarde, former IMF managing director, says that India's GDP would be nearly 30 percent larger if the participation of women were to match that of men.

One explanation for 21st century India's abysmal FPLF ratio is the poor record of state governments, with their ill-trained keystone cops and time-agnostic judicial system unable to provide sufficient security to women in workplaces and rickety public transport systems. Or the judiciary to deter male criminals through swift dispensation of deterrent justice.