Women’s Reservation Bill awaits Parliament nod

Context: 25 years on, Women’s Reservation Bill in Parliament awaits nod which seeking 33% reservation for women in Parliament and state legislative assemblies, and promised a quota for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes within the ambit of the umbrella legislation.
Women's Reservation Bill

• Women’s Reservation Bill [108th Constitution Amendment Bill] is one of the longest pending legislations in the Indian Parliament.
• The Bill seeks to reserve 33.33% seats in the Lok Sabha or the Lower House of Indian Parliament and in the State Legislative Assemblies for women.
• This would be in accordance with the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments which reserved the same percentage of seats for women in rural and urban local bodies respectively.
• The Bill was initially launched in 1996, and has been introduced in the Indian Parliament several times. However, the status of the bill remains undecided primarily due to lack of political consensus.

Key highlights of the Bill

• The Constitution Bill seeks to reserve one-third of all seats for women in the Lok Sabha and the State Legislative Assemblies.
• The allocation of reserved seats shall be determined by such authority as prescribed by the Parliament.
• One third of the total number of seats reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes shall be reserved for women of those groups in Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies.
• Reserved seats may be allotted by rotation to different constituencies in the States or Union Territories.
• Reservation of seats for women shall cease to exist 15 years after the commencement of this Amendment Act.

Arguments in favour of the Bill

• Proponents of the bill stress the necessity of affirmative action to improve the condition of women.
• Some recent studies on panchayats have shown the positive effect of reservation on empowerment of women and on allocation of resources.
• Major political parties are reluctant to give more tickets to women candidates.
• Majority of the female candidates contested as independents or from smaller parties in 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
• While women made up only 9% of the candidates in 2019, they won 14% of the seats, indicating that women significantly outperformed men.

Arguments against the Bill

• The Bill would benefit only women from privileged strata of the society. The reservation should contain 33% reservation within the women’s category for women belonging to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes.
• The Bill would only help female relatives of current politicians to enter public space and thereby defeat the very purpose of the Bill.
• There are instances of women being used as proxies by men to win elections.
• Women in modern India do not need reservation. It would be perceived that they are not competing on merit.
• Rotation of reserved constituencies in every election may reduce the incentive for an MP to work for his constituency as he may be ineligible to seek re-election from that constituency.

Key Facts:

• The first Lok Sabha (constituted on 17 April 1952) only had 24 women members.
• There are 78 women MPs in the 2019 Lok Sabha, highest number in the history of the House.