If there was one statistic of the CCP election results that is encouraging it is the number of women that got elected “ 50 per cent of the wards in the capital city are now represented by women. In contrast, only 12 per cent of MPs in the Lok Sabha are women and the figure for the Rajya Sabha is 12.8 per cent. The lack of representation for women caused India’s rank to slip to 144 among 191 countries.
This prompted President Pranab Mukherjee to make a strong pitch for reviving the Constitutional Amendment Bill to give 33 per cent reservation in Parliament to women. The amendment bill has been hanging fire for decades and every effort to push
it through was sabotaged by men who are reluctant to give up
positions of power. But the truth is that unless seats are reserved,
representation will continue to hover around 10 to 12
per cent. One of the issues raised during the debate was reservation
and rotation of constituencies with political parties
unable to reach a consensus. Although it was suggested that
the onus of fielding more women candidates should be left to
political parties, the fact remains that reservation is a more
simple way of achieving the desired target.
