With less than a year left for the state’s civic bodies’ elections, the Gujarat government has announced its decision to raise reservation for women in all urban and rural local bodies from 33% to 50%. This will affect all municipal corporations, municipalities, and district, taluka and village panchayats.
The step has essentially led to questions about need and timing of the step. Though, 33% reservation was introduced in 1993, political analyst Ghanshyam Shah feels increasing the limit to 50% in local bodies could have waited. “We should have perhaps waited a little longer till the outcome of 33% reservation conditions was clearer. As of now, it looks more like a gimmick. Only upside is that some, no matter how small is the number, woman politicians have emerged at local levels in last one decade and half.”
Ami Yagnik, senior HC advocate and women right activist, feels that reservation has given more “sarpanch-pati than woman sarpanch”. However, she feels that the next generation of women politicians would come up much faster as the shared experience and more openings would be available. “It shall not take another 15-16 years before some change is seen.” On the other hand, faulty member of IIMA, Asha Kaul, says that reservation only leads to incompetence creeping into the system. “The government shall work towards providing equal opportunities to both men and women, keeping in mind all factors, instead to extending reservation.”
However, Shah and Yagnik states that this will help women, who as elected representative of their constituencies, will start asserting themselves.
Moreover, the need is to bring in reservation for women in parliament and state assemblies, Shah said. “That is the demand,” he said, adding that political parties are, however, yet to get their act together on that.
Gujarat would become sixth state to make the move as Bihar, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have already extended the opportunities to their women. For Gujarat, importance of the decision can be gauged from the fact that the AMC, besides 49 municipalities, 24 district panchayats, 208 taluka panchayats, apart from a large number of village panchayats going to polls in October 2010, will have to follow the norm then.
In Dec 2010, 5 municipal corporations of Vadodara, Surat, Rajkot, Jamnagar and Bhavnagar will have elections, apart from several municipalities.
