Women's voices should be heard in climate change debate: Sonia Gandhi

H S Rao
London, Mar 18 (PTI) Women's voices should be heard in
the ongoing global climate change debate as they have played a
stellar role in raising environmental consciousness, Indian
Congress President Sonia Gandhi has demanded and asked the
Commonwealth to take a fresh initiative on this.
Branding climate change as the most difficult
challenge facing the humankind, Gandhi said the climate debate
had so far been gender-blind, ignoring the role played by
women in raising environmental consciousness.
Delivering the Commonwealth lecture 2011 on 'Women as
Agents of Change' at the Royal Commonwealth Society here last
night, she reminded that investment in women had the "highest-
return", and said the society owed it to the women to give
them "greater security" in rapid urbanisation.
Gandhi, also the chairperson of ruling UPA on a
five-day "private visit" here, was given a standing ovation as
she walked to the podium to deliver the lecture as a packed
hall which comprised High Commissioners, Ambassadors and
British lawmakers.
Gandhi said that she sometimes wondered whether
women's greater empathy with nature and concern for their
children's future might not help the world to find a new, more
sustainable, less consumerist path of development.
"In 1989, the Commonwealth became the first major
international organisation to publish a landmark scientific
study on the devastating effects of climate change."
Commonwealth Heads of Government also agreed on a Climate
Change Action Plan in 2007, where, among other things, they
called upon the support of women to ensure effective action.
"How can such support be extended if women's voices
and concerns hardly figure in the global climate negotiations,
or in national and local climate management plans?" she asked.
"Perhaps it is time for a fresh initiative to help the
world bridge this gap. Such an initiative could suggest ways
to bring women's participation and perspectives more squarely
into the global negotiations. We need climate justice not only
between countries, but also between genders," she said.
She said enhancing the role of women in protecting the
environment is necessary.
"But what about protecting women themselves? Economic
growth is leading to mass migration to cities. Disturbingly,
this is being accompanied by growing violence against women.
If urbanisation is the world's future, we must design urban
environments and services in ways that will give women greater
security, and educate and involve citizens in this cause. A
Commonwealth initiative bringing together our great cities to
collaborate on this issue would be timely," she said.
In her lecture, Gandhi set out five areas in which
women have emerged as "agents of change" in India.
They included Self-Help Groups pooling savings and
securing loans for local projects; elected roles for women in
rural self-government; social activism through the
establishment of the language of human rights for women; the
establishment of local enterprise collectives, some of which
have been replicated elsewhere in Asia; and the setting up of
village information centres and IT kiosks.
She said that women's enterprise also played a role in
regions ravaged by violence and conflict, and within India,
these groups had taken the lead in mediating, peace-building
and reconciliation in areas of strife.
"Today, women in India are becoming agents of change
through their own initiative, their energy and enterprise.
Through individual and collective action, they are
transforming their own situations and indeed transforming the
broader social context itself.
"India is at the cusp of a 'demographic dividend', due
to its young and increasingly educated and skilled population
by a 'gender dividend'.
It will, I believe, yield enormous economic gain and
lead to profound social transformation," Gandhi said.
She highlighted the "powerful" role of technology in
reducing gender inequalities through the creation of IT sector
jobs allowing women to live independently, and the
proliferation of knowledge-based enterprises run by women in
rural areas, allowing them to access government services.
The United Progressive Alliance chairperson said it
could be argued that the progressive victories of the women's
movement, their achievement of the right to vote and other
rights, were the 20th century's seminal contribution to human
advancement.
"It has been a long journey. I fervently hope that the
21st century will take this to its logical conclusion. May
this be, not the century of any particular country, but the
century when women finally come into their own, the century
when representative democracy is re-imagined to give women
their due share, the century when the vocabulary of politics
and culture is re-engineered fully to include that other half
of mankind."
The Commonwealth Lecture, now in its 14th year, aims
to stimulate understanding and debate on the Commonwealth and
its role in world affairs.
Previous Lecturers have included the then UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, Professor Muhammed Yunus
and Terry Waite.
Gandhi noted that the modern Commonwealth owed much to
India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who envisaged
that the Commonwealth could be a bridge between the dying
world of Empire and the new post-colonial world being born.
"Nehru, the statesman, saw merit in an institution
that sought to build bridges at many levels between countries
and peoples. She said Mrs Indira Gandhi valued the
Commonwealth in a less idealised way than her father. She
shared a personal bond with the leading Commonwealth figures
of her time and brought to it a special focus on the
development needs of its members," she said.
The Congress President said she accompanied her
husband Rajiv Gandhi to successive Commonwealth Heads of
Government Meetings and "remember some of the colourful
episodes that took place behind the scenes."
She said "although the women's movement has already
transformed the way in which we look at society in each of our
countries, the search for equality is far from finished.
"History, culture and economics still remain weighted
against women. In my own country, most worrying of all is the
declining sex ratio of females to males. The age-old
preference for sons, coupled with the development of
sex-selection technologies, has given an alarming demographic
twist to gender bias. That this is happening in regions of
substantial economic prosperity within the country is even
more disturbing."
At the same time, she pointed out that in the recent
Commonwealth Games in India's capital New Delhi, young women
from these very regions won the most number of medals.
"In a poignant interview, one of them recalled that
her parents had wished her to be a boy - but reconciled
themselves after she developed her sporting prowess."
She said the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw
the emergence of a number of outstanding social reforms.
"But it was Mahatma Gandhi who brought about the first
real and nation-wide wave of emancipation through his mass
mobilisation of women into the freedom movement.
"Unusually for his time, he believed that India's
economic and moral salvation lay in women's hands. He
condemned the traditions of child marriage, female seclusion,
dowry, enforced widowhood, and the lack of education that had
shackled Indian women for so long," she said.
"Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of our Nation, can perhaps
also be called the Mother of Indian feminism," she said.
Gandhi said a visitor to contemporary India will be
impressed by the prominence of women in all aspects of life.
"India's President is a woman, as are the Speaker and
the Leader of the Opposition in the Lower House of Parliament.
The Chief Minister of India's most populous state is a woman
from a section of society subjected to discrimination for
centuries. Women are Presidents of four of our major political
parties, including myself," she said.
"Women are prominent in the judiciary, the higher
civil service, the professions, academia, the corporate world,
the media and every branch of civil society. At the time of
Independence, women accounted for less than 10 per cent of
enrolment in higher education - they will soon be on par with
men," she added.
Referring to Women's Reservation, she said in 1993,
India amended its Constitution to provide 33 per cent
reservation or quota for women in rural and urban local bodies
throughout the country.
"There was cynicism, resentment and even anger - from
powerful men, predictably - when the idea was first mooted. No
longer. Today, 1.2 million elected women representatives,
including women from the most deprived and disadvantaged
communities, have taken their place alongside men in the
councils of rural self-government. Long established power
equations are now changing."
But, Gandhi said, she was less than happy to admit
that at the national level "we have not yet been successful.
Women's representation in Parliament has hovered between 9 and
11 per cent, a figure that is considerably lower than in many
other democracies. Legislation for a 33 per cent quota in
Parliament and state assemblies has been passed by the Upper
House. We shall persevere in our efforts to get it approved
by the Lower House as well."
The third area where women are leaving their
distinctive imprint as harbingers of change is social
activism, she said. The fourth area of impact is enterprise.
The most visible may be women who lead some major
Indian corporations, businesses and NGOs.
"But, perhaps even more significant are the unsung
majority - who make up over 90 per cent of all working women
in what we call the informal or unorganised sector. For years,
they enjoyed no pension, health insurance or maternity
benefits, something that our government has begun to address,"
Gandhi said.
Finally, technology is proving to be a powerful tool
for reducing gender inequalities.
In the "sunrise IT sector women already comprise close
to one third - a million strong - of its workforce. There is a
proliferation of knowledge-based enterprises, run by women in
rural areas, such as village information centres and IT kiosks
for accessing government services. Their ripple effect is
growing."