Date:26/12/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/12/26/stories/2007122653751400.htm

National

Priority for women in IAS, IPS planned

Special Correspondent

Eleventh Plan focus on women’s empowerment

NEW DELHI: Reiterating its commitment to ensuring the participation of women in governance through the smooth passage of the much-delayed Women’s Reservation Bill, the government intends to make the Union Women and Child Development Ministry the nodal point for creating and maintaining a comprehensive gender-disaggregated database, for quantitative and qualitative data.

According to the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, endorsed by the National Development Council last week, pro-active efforts will be made to provide competitive exam training and prioritise recruitment of women to All-India Services, especially the Indian Administrative, Foreign and Police Services.

The purpose of maintaining a gender data would be to base new initiatives on facts and figures, assess the gender impact of programmes and assess the level of women’s participation in planning and implementing programmes.

There will be simultaneous training and inputs for women in the Panchayati Raj institutions to enable them to influence gender-sensitive local planning and implementation. Gender disaggregated data on the participation of women, especially in SCs/STs and minority women, in elected constitutional bodies, Council of Ministers and in the overall government sector will be collected and made available in the public domain.

For Muslim women

To tackle the double discrimination faced by Muslim women, the Women and Child Development Ministry will formulate and implement a pilot scheme for “Leadership Development for Life, Livelihood, and Civic Empowerment of Minority Women”. This scheme will reach out to minority women and provide them with support, leadership training and skill development so that they can move out of the confines of home and community and assume leadership roles in accessing facilities that will improve their lives and livelihoods. The scheme will give them training, inputs, information and the confidence to interact with the government system. Implementation of the scheme through non-governmental organisation, in the initial phase, will also encourage the NGO sector to take up work with this neglected community.

In the first phase, the scheme would be launched in five states with large minority population and is expected to reach 35,000 to 50,000 women directly and hundreds of thousands indirectly.

As the nodal agency for the empowerment of women, one of the important tasks for the Women and Child Development Ministry will be to curtail the “harmful effects” of television on women’s lives through a gender-informed media policy.