Effects of women's reservation in panchayats notable: official

Lalit K Jha

Washington, Jun 11 (PTI) Noting that India's
successful experiment with women's reservation in local bodies
was a 'silent revolution', a top US official told lawmakers
that American agencies would like to work with India to extend
the example regionally.

Melanne Verveer, Ambassador-at-Large for Global
Women's Issues, said empirical studies had shown a correlation
between the increase in women in local bodies and their
performance and benefits to the people, with greater public
resources coming in, "not being siphoned off in ways that were
previously siphoned off".
"With Indian government we were talking about the
great success story that panchayat system is in India where
because of a quota, but now well beyond the quota, upwards of
40 (per cent) to 50 per cent of these village and municipal
council level elected positions are held by women," Verveer
told a Congressional committee.
Noting that more than a million women across the
country have been elected at the local or panchayat level --
the highest such female representation for any democracy,
Verveer said India and the US recently had a dialogue in this
regard.
"There's an effort now with our coming together to
take that experience and help build the capacity more broadly
regionally which would obviously be a contribution to
enhancing the role of women's political participation at the
local level," Verveer said in response to a question.
"So both on the level of procedures within the
Department (of State) and then in terms of the kinds of
programmes we've been engaged in that need to be sustained I
would say it's not an either/or but a both and for us to go
forward," she said.
In India, approximately 40 per cent of all elected
representatives in villages and municipal councils are women.
"The success of India's panchayats has often been
referred to as a silent revolution within the democratic
decentralisation process," she said in her testimony before
the Subcommittee on International Organisations, Human Rights
and Oversight of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
She said according to many studies, women-led
panchayats have provided more public services, from building
wells to roads, and they acquired more public funding for
local projects.
"These panchayats have improved attention to service
delivery such as the water supply, sanitation, and other
issues including education," she said. (MORE) PTI LKJ
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