November 21, 2024

Reservation For Women: Long Overdue

By Our Editorial Team
First publised on 2023-09-20 06:11:31

About the Author

The India Commentary view

View all posts by this Author

The Constitution amendment bill to provide for 33% reservation for seats in Parliament and state legislatures was tabled in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday. Hanging fire for more than 27 years, during which it was once passed by the Rajya Sabha but lapsed as it was not passed by the Lok Sabha, the women's quota bill is likely to be passed this time as, apart for some disagreement over sub-quotas within the quota, there is general consensus among political parties in favour of the amendment and Prime Minister has thrown his full weight behind the measure. 

With women occupying not more than 15% of the seats in Parliament and state legislatures despite comprising nearly 50% of the population, it is high time that women get proportional representation in legislatures. Ideally, the quota should be 50% but 33% is a good beginning. But even after the passage of the bill, women will have to wait for the quota to kick in as first the 2021 census needs to be completed and then the delimitation exercise it will throw open will have to be done and dusted before the reservation can be implemented.

Although the new amendment proposes to reserve one-third of the seats reserved for women for women belonging to SC/ST, there have been separate demands from some parties to reserve seats for OBCs too. Then there is the question of rotation of reserved seats. The bill provides that such rotation will take place after each subsequent exercise of delimitation. Since there is time before reservation kicks in, all political parties will do well to arrive at a consensus on these issues so that there is no confusion in future.

The debate on the bill in Parliament must provide constructive ideas to better the law and since political parties are agreed that it should be implemented, small issues must not come in the way of the passage of the amendment.