No country for women

International Women’s Day, observed on 8 March, will be special for a chosen few this year. Women who have achieved success in various fields will handle Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s social media accounts on that day.

“The platform may be mine, but it will be about their experiences, their challenges and their achievements,” the PM declared in his latest Mann Ki Baat broadcast, reprising the 2020 gimmick when he handed over his social media accounts to seven leading women from different fields.

Grandstanding and campaign promises come easy to our prime minister. He also has an appetite for catchy slogans and there is quite an army at his disposal to keep up a steady flow of catchphrases and one-liners. He saw the potential electoral dividends in targeting women quite early in his first term — and so was born the ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’ campaign, launched in 2015.

There have been many such over the years — ‘Ujjwala Yojana’ ‘Ladli Behna’, ‘Mahila Samman Savings’, ‘Lakhpati Didi’, ‘Drone Didi’, ‘Nari Shakti’… it’s an impressively long list and the prime minister claims his government has spent Rs 3–4 lakh crore on various welfare schemes for women.

Dr Ranjana Kumari, who heads the Centre of Social Research, says, “There is no data on how these schemes have impacted women. This government does not encourage research; so, universities and NGOs who work on the ground are simply not willing to step out and collect data.”

In the BJP-ruled state of Madhya Pradesh, one such scheme was the Mukhyamantri Ladli Behna Yojana, announced ahead of the 2023 assembly elections. Facing anti-incumbency, the then chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan took a desperate stab to secure the votes of women — and the gamble paid off.

But, says Smita, an activist who works with tribals in southern Madhya Pradesh: “Women were selected for the scheme on a random basis. Those who made the cut, and are receiving a monthly instalment, are very happy, but those who were excluded feel jealous.’’ The scheme is said to have benefited 13 million women, but the number of eligible beneficiaries, at 25 million, is nearly double. Who cares, though? The next election is far away, and by the time it comes around, sure as the sun rises in the east, there’ll be new promises.

MP provided the template for Maharashtra, where elections were held in November 2024. After announcing the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana in August 2024, the Eknath Shinde government was in such a hurry to implement it that a list of 2.46 crore beneficiaries was drawn up without checking to see whether these women were already availing benefits from other welfare schemes or whether their family earnings exceeded the Rs 2.5 lakh annual income eligibility threshold.

But the Yojana did its job and the Mahayuti alliance returned to power with a big (if questionable) mandate. Job done, the list of beneficiaries is being reviewed and last heard, some 20 lakh beneficiaries have reportedly been removed and many others asked to return the money they have received.

Under the Ujjwala Yojana, the Central government claims to have distributed over 95 million deposit-free LPG connections to poor rural households between 2016 and 2023. (Do note the ‘Pradhan Mantri’ prefix in the official name of a goodish number of these welfare schemes, including this one, to legitimise the use of Narendra Modi’s beneficent mugshot in advertisements and promotional literature.) To return to the Ujjwala Yojana, a cylinder refill costs over Rs 1,000, which effectively forces women in rural India to go back to their old, polluting sources of fuel.

Similarly, the government’s claims on turning India open-defecation free (ODF) were spun, among its other spins, as an initiative to safeguard women’s dignity.

Surveys have shown the government claims to be a pack of lies. Lie #1: the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan was a repackaged Manmohan Singh-era initiative. The ODF initiative was initially implemented as part of the ‘Total Sanitation Campaign’, later restructured and renamed Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA) in 2012. The NBA modestly claimed to accelerate sanitation coverage in rural India by promoting toilet construction and behavioural change.

The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, in keeping with the Modi government’s compulsive one-upmanship, pitched it as an ambition to go ‘100% open defecation-free’, built toilets in a frenzy, ratcheted up their numbers in a bigger frenzy, so that it could claim that India had gone open defecation-free.

Brings us to Lie #2: while the government claims ODF status based on toilet construction and village self-certification, independent surveys have shown that defecation in the open continues in rural India at scale. A joint monitoring programme of the WHO and UNICEF indicates that in 2022, about 17 per cent of India’s rural population continued the practice and about 25 per cent still lacked basic sanitation facilities. Travel across India, and the one complaint one hears from women is the rapid privatisation of education and health facilities they can no longer access.

Says Savitabai, a Warli tribal woman in Maharashtra’s Usgaon village: “Closure of a girls’ schools in our neighbourhood means girls have to walk longer distances. That is not safe. We now keep them at home so they can perform household duties.” The 2.6 million anganwadi workers, tasked with supervising childcare centres and delivering primary healthcare services, say monthly honorariums are not commensurate with the work expected from them.

As per PLFS (periodic labour force survey) data, the participation of rural women in the labour force has gone up from 24.6 per cent in 2017–18 to 47.6 per cent in 2023–24. The government has been busily projecting this as the success of its efforts to promote women’s employment. But what the flattering topline data conceals is that the rise is largely due to rising self-employment, which includes both paid work and disguised unemployment.

Another area where the government has abjectly failed women is their safety. Crimes against women — rape, murder after rape, gang rape — have all shown a steep rise. National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data reveals that one woman is raped every 18 minutes.

The BJP-ruled state of Uttar Pradesh has been a consistent worst offender: 65,743 (recorded) cases of crime against women in 2022; 56,083 in 2021; 48,385 in 2020. That uptrend leaves very little to the imagination. In August 2023, a 15-year-old in UP’s Kaushambi district died by suicide after a video clip of her rape went viral; in November the same year, there was a similar video of three boys, reportedly from the BJP’s IT cell in Varanasi, gang-raping a BTech IIT student at Banaras Hindu University.

On 28 February 2024, two young girls aged 14 and 16 were found hanging from a tree. Both worked in a brick kiln with their parents and were from a village in Kanpur district. The owner of the kiln, along with his son and nephew, reportedly force-fed them alcohol and then gang-raped them, once again video recording the entire gruesome act.

What defence do these young girls or their families have? And what has the government done about it beyond all the grandstanding about ‘Beti Bachao’, ‘Nari Shakti’ and other such sound bytes on loop?