Mind the gap: on India and the Global Gender Gap Index report
India has dropped two points from its position last year in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index report, holding at 131 out of 148 countries. The parity score is just 64.1%, making it among one of the lowest-ranked countries in South Asia, according to the report released last week. The Index measures gender parity in a country across four aspects — economic participation and opportunity; educational attainment; health and survival, and political empowerment. While the performance of India in three of the four dimensions is either stable or has marginally improved, the significant lack of achievement in the fourth weighs down the overall result. The report says, in the economic participation and opportunity category, India has improved by +0.9 percentage points. The parity in estimated earned income rises from 28.6% to 29.9%, positively impacting the subindex score, the report said. Scores in labour force participation rate remained the same (45.9%) as last year — India's highest achieved to date. In the educational attainment and health and survival categories, the scores have been driven up by positive shifts. It is in the political empowerment category that India records a drop in parity, since the last evaluation. Female representation in Parliament fell from 14.7% to 13.8% in 2025, lowering the indicator score for the second year in a row below 2023 levels. Also evaluated was the share of women in ministerial roles, which fell from 6.5% to 5.6 %, continuing the sinking trend since 2023.
The path ahead is obvious — consolidate and improve on the gains and make efforts to set right the lacunae with policies and political will. India has had a long, shameful tussle on this issue as it toyed with the idea of increasing representation for women in polity. The controversial Women's Reservation Bill was passed in 2023, 27 years after it was first introduced in 1996. The Bill has been visited upon by many charades, was blocked at every turn, and the path to actualisation of the goal was lined with monumental impediments. The present Act reserves one third of the seats for women in Parliament and the State legislatures, but will only be implemented from 2029, after the completion of the Census, and the delimitation exercise. But India climbing up the ranks of a global index should be only secondary to achieving a rounded, applause-worthy, gender parity structure within the country. There is, also, nothing keeping political parties from increasing women's participation in the electoral process, even before the law necessitates it.
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