Bagchi directs our attention to how a key focus of this document was to prevent tendencies within policy makers to depoliticise welfare policies and development measures. The thrust of the text was to suggest that issues of women’s education, employment, health are all political issues and should be treated as such, instead of assuming that these issues could be addressed exclusively through economic and technocratic measures. Further, the document highlighted how in the need to establish equality, one should not lose sight of diversity. Within the Indian context, this meant being cautious of imposing dominant ‘upper’ caste Hindu majoritarian views of womanhood on all Indian women. Bagchi pointed out another key aspect about the document. She suggested that processes of modernisation and Sanskritization, contrary to dominant narratives of progress and development, did nothing to resist women’s oppression induced by traditional customs and mores. These progressivist social processes, in actuality, exacerbated tradition-induced oppression. Bagchi draws from Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on Inequality’ to suggest how civilisation, in fact, had given rise to inequality amongst humans.

Further, the Report suggested how an increase in per-capita income and economic growth have often negatively impacted women’s chances of survival in the family. The document, with its overt emphasis on the need to retain some of the methodological insights and political visions of the Indian anticolonial movement and anticolonial thought, did not presuppose that the best way to address the problem of gender-based neglect was to ensure that women got graduated into entrepreneurial, investment-worthy, return-inducing, economic subjects. Instead, the Report, prepared by some of the most crusading Indian feminist activist-scholars of the time like Vina Mazumdar, Lotika Sarkar, Leela Dube and Phulrenu Guha,suggested that the modes of knowledge that formal bourgeois vocational training-based education structures (geared towards, what sociologist Aysel Madra has called ‘interventionist secularisation’) provided, was often unhelpful for furthering the ‘woman’s question’ under postcolonial conditions.

Moreover, although the Report did highlight the need to provide young women with better access to property rights and employment, and to acknowledge women’s non-waged labour (performed both in the household and in the ‘unorganised’ sector) as productive, it did not find it particularly useful to peg the question of the reduction of female survival rates to women’s ‘productivity’, ‘efficiency’ or ‘worth’. This is also a key ground where the Towards Equality Report was markedly different from something like the Human Development approach propounded by the Nobel-winning development economist Amartya Sen.

In addition to this, the Report highlighted, as Bagchi noted, the varied lessons on development and collective strength that unlettered female agricultural labourers from the rural areas of India could teach to people dwelling in the cities, and how policy makers should bear this in mind while framing welfare policies. The report, as Bagchi also pointed out, led to the launching of Women’s Commissions in both the different states of India as well as at the Centre. The other key institutional consequence that this Report had was the establishment of the academic discipline of Women’s Studies in Indian universities and research centres. Consequently, Bagchi draws our attention to how a lasting legacy of this Report is to testify how Feminist Studies in India, by no means, was an import from the West. Rather, Women’s Studies in India was in constant conversation with the Indian women’s movement, which gave rise to the burgeoning field of Feminist Studies in India.

Finally, as another key feminist scholar-activist Ayesha Kidwai has recently pointed out, the Report put a significant amount of premium on the need to make a scrupulous, purposive and sustained endeavour towards expanding women’s education. In fact, the education system was identified as a key institution for bringing about societal change geared towards the emancipation of women in all walks of life.

References

Bagchi, Jasodhara. 2013. ‘Towards equality.’ Social Scientist, 41(11/12), pp.11-23.

Kidwai, Ayesha. 2021. ‘Towards inequality.’ Postcolonial Studies, 24(1), pp.33-39.

Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, Department of Social Welfare, Ministry of Education and Social Welfare, Government of India, December 1974.