India’s G20 Pitch On Gender Equality And Women’s Empowerment: Prospects And Challenges Ahead

For India, the G-20 presidency has accorded an opportunity to set a benchmark and showcase its leadership on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE). So what marks India’s presidency, in terms of its commitment to the project of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment? What has India done differently, or is doing differently?

First and foremost, India has spearheaded a normative shift in the narrative on gender equality and empowerment, with a focus on women-led development, and not just simply women’s development. This shift in narrative on gender norms brings women as actors to the centre stage of the development story. It underlines that women are not just passive subjects but are agents, collaborators and decision-makers in the stories of transformative socio-economic change. It would not be far-fledged to classify India, as a ‘norm entrepreneur’ – a global south actor not just interested in setting the norm, but bringing about sustainable, and holistic transformative change, through the participation of women on an equal, and equitable footing.

Second, this normative shift in narrative presents a unique opportunity for India to advance, what Lakshmi Puri (2023: 18) very rightly states, “….the normative of implementation” of the UN’s Global Gender Equality Compact, individually and collectively by G20 countries and to drive global action and achievement in a short time”. The point of emphasis is by squarely bringing issues of women’s development and empowerment to the centre stage of G-20 priority markers, with cross-cutting themes on education, entrepreneurship, technology, finance and beyond, India has in many ways advanced the UN-led global normative frameworks, like Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Resolutions adopted in the UN General Assembly (UNGA), United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) every year, the Beijing Platform for Action with 12 Action Areas of commitments, SDG 5 and UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security. While India is a signatory to CEDAW, it has refrained from endorsing the UNSCR 1325, but with its renewed focus on gender equality and empowerment within the framework of G20, in many ways, it has reiterated its commitment to advance the Global Gender Equality Compact.

Third, through a close reading of India’s G-20 pitch on women’s led development with a focus on education, entrepreneurship, technology and finance, amongst others, one can discern a normative focus on the idea of ‘participation’ – a crucial gender norm in the story of transformative socio-economic change. The normative focus on ‘participation to plug the gender gap is even more significant for developing countries like India, which has been ranked 127 out of 146 countries in terms of gender parity — according to the World Economic Forum’s annual Gender Gap Report, 2023. Further, it is important to underline that historically India has reported a low FLFPR. For instance, data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS July 2021-June 2022) shows 29.4% of women (aged 15-59) were part of India’s labour force in 2021-22, as compared to 29.8% in the preceding year. Of course, it goes without saying that India, like many other nations in the G20 grouping, is far from the “25x25” commitment adopted at the Brisbane Summit in 2014, aimed at reducing the gender gap in labour force participation by 25% by the year 2025.

Against this backdrop, India’s effort to bring women-led development as a priority marker in the G20 agenda is noteworthy. Further, it has accorded India an opportunity to showcase the ‘India’ story of the women-led development marked by PM Modi’s emphasis on the ideas of Nari Shakti. While the ambit of engagement is broad, there are three areas that deserve particular attention, as India scripts the development narrative, in a language that recognises the drivers of structural inequality, discrimination and violence that impact men and women differently. First, in the field of education, there are efforts to foster gender equity with a focus on STEM, and TechEquity, a Digital Inclusion Platform through which girls and women can skill, upskill and reskill themselves in digital literacy, financial literacy and other technical subjects. Second, India’s focus on leadership of women at local or grassroots levels a Jan Bhagidari or citizen’s engagement, and emphasis on women and climate change resilience. Third, it has accorded the much-needed push for engendering the variables of health, and food security. One of the critical contributions of its presidency included Poshan Tracker, a unique ICT platform developed as a governance tool for monitoring nutrition services and early childhood care service delivery for close to 100 million registered beneficiaries including pregnant women, lactating mothers, children under 6 years of age and adolescent girls across 1.4 million Anganwadi Centres.

What is unique to India’s efforts, is that it has not only set the agenda, in terms of the language and normative content of gender equality, and women’s empowerment but also demonstrated how this normative shift, can be translated on the global, national and local scale. For a norm entrepreneur like India, the story of norm translation, or its implementation is as significant, as the story of norm-setting – in terms of its pitch for gender equality and women’s led development.

However, while we celebrate India’s efforts to set benchmarks on the global, and regional scale, there is also a need for greater reflexivity on the national narrative on women-led development. So, while the focus on women as drivers of change is a welcome first step, it needs to be qualified by recognising the structural, cultural and economic impediments that women continue to face in terms of their everyday ‘lived experiences’ in India. So the participation pitch for women as changemakers will be an incomplete transformative story if it is not matched with implementation and sustainability drive at the local level. It goes without saying that the story of women-led development needs to pay attention to the intersecting axis of oppression, and subjugation that women continue to face in India given their positionality on an intersecting axis of caste, class, religion and region. So, for instance, how a Dalit woman experiences discrimination would be very different from how a Muslim woman experiences violence or discrimination. The point is gender and issues of transformative gender justice are a complex terrain in the Global South, mediated by differing lived experiences that need to be carefully navigated beyond the celebratory overtones of the optics of the narrative of change.

India’s G20 presidency is also a sombre reminder that the gender story on the development map is a complex story that needs coordinated plurilateral mechanisms and strong political will for change. India surely has taken the right steps in that direction and much needs to be carefully watched as we hand the baton to Brazil.

(Shweta Singh is a professor at the Department of International Relations, South Asian University)