Introduction Coming in the wake of the International Women Year Towards Equality alerted us to the dynamics of gender in our society, keeping in mind the promised goal of equality between men and women guaranteed in the Constitution. It was an official document to beat all documents, for it succeeded in capturing the vibrant dimension of the Indian polity. One of the major recommendations of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI) report was that there should be women commissions to address the issues pertaining to women who appear to have remained neglected and deprived. It was as a fall-out of this recommendation that we find a National Commission was set up at the Centre and many of the states in India through separate legislations. The National Commission for Women had entrusted Dr Sarala Gopalan to bring the story of the Unfinished Agenda of the report on Towards Equality upto the end of the twentieth century, but nothing so far had been done for the state of West Bengal. Hence, by writing an introduction to a narrative of the changing status of women in West Bengal, compiled under the aegis of the West Bengal Commission for Women, one is repaying a long-standing debt to the mother-document Towards Equality. Professor Bela Dutta Gupta, the former chairperson of the West Bengal Commission for Women, Smt. Geeta Sen Gupta, former vice-chairperson, enthusiastic senior members like Vidya Munshi and Manjari Gupta and younger members like Malini Bhattacharya and Ratnabali Chattopadhyay mooted the proposal of compiling a status report for West Bengal. I was entrusted with co-ordinating the report from the beginning. After lying dormant for some time the project was re-activated after the present committee took over at the end of 2001. I am happy to be in a position, as chairperson of the State Women Commission, to be able to bring to an end, a collective venture of this magnitude. The larger committee which had discussed the parameters within which the evolving status of women and children in West Bengal could be best captured, had decided on the following: Demography, Health and Nutrition, Education, Economic Empowerment, Political Participation, Law and Violence, Culture. At a later stage it was decided to introduce a chapter on Tribal Women. During the planning period it was further decided to have a number of micro-studies (included in the Appendices) to accompany the main chapters covering the parameters mentioned above, to make the qualitative aspect of the data more visible. The Sociological Research Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute was commissioned to do a major survey in the district of Birbhum, focussing on the Kartri, (the women head of the household) to gauge the gender dynamics of community, family, assets and workplace. We have named our document The Challenge Ahead. Using some of the basic parameters of our social existence, we have tried to show how women and girls of West Bengal have fared during the last three decades of the twentieth century, so that we can pinpoint the areas of vulnerability as well as those of success. Why did we choose to talk about the changing status rather than the status of women? The last three decades have been especially significant for developments within the women movement all over India. Starting with the interventions on Mathura Rape Case leading to the united struggle of the women in India, demanding and achieving reform in rape law, the publication of Towards Equality, the launching of the Indian Association of Women Studies in the early eighties, the founding of the National and State Commissions for Women in the early nineties, down to the Supreme Court Guidelines on Sexual Harassment at Workplace in 1997. This was also the period in which the Government of India ratified in 1993 the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), accepted by the UN in 1979. Autonomous women groups, committed to gender justice, with affiliation to many different political parties came into existence in this phase. Towards the end of the eighties two of the major universities of the State, Jadavpur University and Calcutta University were given women studies centres by the University Grants Commission. Jadavpur University had already conceived of it as an interdisciplinary School of Women Studies committed to capturing gender perspectives holistically not compartmentalized by different disciplines. For most of the thirty-year span that this report covers, West Bengal has been under a stable Left Front Government and has carried out a regime of land reforms, though the accession to demand for land reforms came later. The Left Front government had already introduced decentralized planning at the district level and the panchayat level, so that when the 73rd and 74th Amendments were passed, giving 33.3 per cent reservation to rural women, West Bengal was in a position to implement these in a meaningful manner. The report tries to capture conditions of women and girls in West Bengal within the socio-economic and politico-cultural ambience that has marked West Bengal in the last thirty years of the last century and acknowledges that status of women cannot be conceived as monolithic and static. The direction of gender policy in our state is likely to depend on the analysis of the data emerging from this report. There is an uphill task before us in achieving gender justice that is appropriate to a state like West Bengal. The demographic profile of the state shows certain upward trends, for instance the Life Expectancy at Birth (LEB) of women have outstripped that of men, thereby making amends for the general sex-ratio. Although just above the national average, the child sex ratio still shows a disturbing decline in the 0-6 years age group. Son preference in its many manifestations appears to stand at the helm of many social evils. It battens on the looming prospect of dowry that stands as one of the prime movers of social injustice and crime against women. The structural adjustment policy that was meant to accompany economic liberalization under the aegis of globalization has hit the opportunities of the different classes differently, of which poor women have been hit the hardest. Destitute women in rural and urban areas alike and assetless widows and female-headed households will need to be specially addressed. We also have to pay attention to the below poverty line groups, who deserve special attention. The signals under LPG, that is, Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization are trying to wean the state away even from the meagre allocation to the socially beneficial sectors. We expect innovative policies to emerge out of this document that will help the emergence of a truly developmental state in active partnership with the civil society organizations. The Nineties saw the intensification of the challenge. While the DPEP tried to do some damage control in primary education, health, education, food security that can be best ensured through employment, opportunities for women have all faced the challenge of privatization. Primary Health Centres and ICDS programmes the two main service providers in health for the vast majority of our women are also feeling the pinch. By distorting the notion of market, unbridled consumerism has been trying to influence the representation of women in the media. While the look of poverty is increasingly getting feminized, forces of masculinity, both frustrated and aggressive, have unleashed various forces of violence against women. In this perspective, we look forward to larger number of women in decision-making roles, emanating not only from the rich reservoir of women members in the Panchayati Raj Institutions, but from all other walks of life. We look forward to the 33 per cent reservation for women in legislatures, both in the State and at the Centre so that women could play a more effective role in spreading the fruit of social justice and entitlements. Thereby ensuring the equality guaranteed in the Constitution to all the marginal and deprived sections in our society and to their women in particular. The aim of this report is to capture the process within which the women and the girls in West Bengal responded to the challenges posed by the CSWI report and what direction the challenges took. Standing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this study is published with the hope that it will help the people of West Bengal as well as its policymakers to bring into sharper focus the nature of the challenge that lies ahead and the assets that may be picked up from the past struggle for confronting the challenges. |
Status-report 
