11 WOMEN AND DEVELOPMENT:

REVISITING THE TOWARDS

EQUALITY REPORT
Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty

This excursus examines the tropes of gendering the trajectories of

development and it seeks to do that through an assessment of the
Towards Equality Report which was a path breaking attempt to
evaluate the range and scope of development through the optics of
gender. Equality has been the goal of the women’s movements in
India through its teleological development. The triggering point can
be traced back to the path-breaking report –Towards Equality: Report
of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, published in 1974
which provides a vantage point to have a parallax view of the women’s
movement in India vis-à-vis Indian democracy and the building of
the modern nation. This publication which is called a ‘benchmark’
indicated the beginning of the new phase in the women’s movement,
along with other two factors. One is the oppositional movements of
the late 1960s and early 1970s and the other is the resistance developed
towards the Emergency issued by the first female Prime Minister of
India. This report not only offered a reality-check on the condition
of women in India, it also unravelled the disenchantment of women
with the existing models of development and the process of
modernisation in the Nehruvian era. It offers a critique of the role of
the state vis-à-vis women’s development and it uncovers how state
policy failed to live up to the constitutional mandates of equality in
every field for man and woman. Thus, it necessitated a kind of shift
from the egalitarian scientific method of development. It forced a
kind of reconceptualisation of the prevalent discourses on
development, economic empowerment, policy-making, political
208 DYNAMICS OF DEVELOPMENT AND DISCONTENT

representation, education, health and family welfare relating to

women in India. What is mean by ‘women’s development’ is a model
of development which caters to improvement of various aspects
associated with women’s life. It specifically deals with the economic,
social, political and educational development of women. It also
analyzed the double bind created by the compliance of the state and
the family in the complex, diverse, hierarchical and patriarchal social
system towards women. It was indeed an ‘eye-opener’ and as Tharu
and Lalita puts in their famous book; …its detailed analysis is as
powerful and effective an indictment of the nation’s priorities in its
first quarter century as any of the protest movements had been, its
influence tremendous. (Tharu and Lalita, 1994)

Committee on the Status of Women in India

The primary focus of the members of the Committee was to build up
a comprehensive review of the rights and status of women in India
with special references to education and employment, the indicators
of development in the constitution. This would work within the
available parameters of the constitutional, legal and administrative
provisions. The basic motto was to offer recommendations ‘which
would enable women to play their full and proper role in the building
up of the nation’ (Towards Equality Report, p.301) and thus to become
its complying citizen subject. This state-sponsored report was actually
propagated by the state to represent itself in the scheduled United
Nation’s International Women’s Year in Mexico in 1975. But this fact-
finding mission proved to be a boomerang for the state as the Report
ironically mocks the much trumpeted notion of constitutional equality
by showing how unequal women are. It brought forth the dismal
representation of the decreasing sex-ratio, women’s strategic
exclusion from the processes of capitalism and modernisation, the
status of legislative reforms within different cultural and social
communities and the tiny success achieved in the political
empowerment of women.
The only exception to this grim picture was the increasing
participation of the middle-class women in education. The unabashed
severity of the report nullified the claims of the state of its progress.
It also raised the questions against the state-propagated development
models with its focuses on the universality of the planning and
WOMEN AND DEVELOPMENT: REVISITING THE TOWARDS EQUALITY REPORT 209

bureaucracy which gradually made the women question invisible

from the public arena as well as from the developmental policies.
This leads to the shift of perspective from women as subjects to be
educated to the women as subjects of investigation and study.

Twenty Years of Publication of the Towards Equality Report

1994 marked the completion of the twenty years of the publication of
the Towards Equality report. It generated the collective review of
the Report by the members associated with it. In hindsight, it became
an effort to relocate the shortcomings and the major omissions of the
grave issues like violence against women, various aspects of women’s
health and education and the diversity of women in India. The
revision also tried to analysis the blunted political edge of the report
which only confined itself with the social narrative. This paper tries
to offer another critical revision of the Towards Equality Report which
is on the verge of completion of its forty years.

The Planning Commission and Women’s Development

The Planning Commission from its inception concentrated on a very
limited notion of women’s development which was confined to
education, social welfare and health. As it is mentioned by the
Commission of the Status of Women (1974, 308), “The order of
priorities up to the Fourth Plan has been education, then health, and
lastly other aspects of welfare because it was generally assumed that
all other programmes will benefit women indirectly, if not directly.”
Neither in the Report nor in the subsequent models of development,
has the necessity to prioritize the notion of women’s earning capacity
come to the fore. This attitude of the state does not only affect the
conceptualization of the development strategy, but it also diverts
the attention of the women’s organization from its focus on the
women’s active participation in the economic arena to women’s
position as a mere beneficiary of the results of economic development.
This attitude is not only inherent within the state policies, but it is
deeply entrenched within the socio-cultural and traditional
framework which sees women’s economic role as an extension of
women’s domestic role as the caregiver and homemaker.
210 DYNAMICS OF DEVELOPMENT AND DISCONTENT

Women’s Development after Economic Liberalisation.

This tendency – treating women as only the object and target of the
economic development and not the subject of it – has continued in
the era of economic liberalization and the advent of globalisation in
the post 1990s (John, 2008, p.2-5). Women become the new tool of
objectification and target consumers, rather than becoming
empowered as the true economic subject. It rather leads to a notion
of pseudo-empowerment which entails the acquiescence and the
unconscious consensus for the liberal economic policies. Vina
Mazumdar and Indu Agnihotri in their pioneering study, ‘Changing
Terms of Political Discourse: Women’s Movement in India, 1970s-
1990s, show that this lack of economic subject-hood has a deep impact
on increasing violence against women and the status of women is
closely connected with women’s economic empowerment. They
analyses the close link between marginalization of women as economic
beings and the sexual violence against women. They unravel those
most modern techniques of propaganda that project women as
consumers and reproductive beings, not as producers.
Fundamentalism provides ideological framework of ‘tradition’ and
‘culture’ on the one hand and globalization and the ‘glorification of
the market’ provide the operative instrument to demolish women’s
claims to equality, freedom and dignity as individuals, on the other
hand. This ‘awesome combination of hegemonic discourses’ begins
its control within the family and later it is reinforced by state-policies.
This makes the field ripe for sexual violence against women.
The complexities of the relationship between the macro-economic
changes and the issues of women’s status at different levels of the
society remained relegated by the social scientists up to the ensuing
of the CSWI Report. The Committee in its recommendations focused
on the need to analyze this relationship in a more critical level. These
recommendations prompted the social scientists, a group of women
members in the Parliament and some concerned bureaucrats to
constitute groups on behalf of the Planning Commission to quest for
alternative strategies of women’s development which will take into
account the majority of the women in concern. Alongside this, the
memorandum prepared by the ICSSR committee on women’s studies
also highlighted “the increasing devaluation of women in the economy
and society, and recommended special strategy for employment,
WOMEN AND DEVELOPMENT: REVISITING THE TOWARDS EQUALITY REPORT 211

health and education.” (ICSSR, 1977) All these initiations on the issue
of women’s development formed the thrust of another major
memorandum issued by the women’s organizations as one of the
first joint statement on the behalf of the women’s organizations in
Indian Women in the Eighties: Development Imperatives. One of the
major conclusions is; unless explicit provision for the imperative
developmental needs of women is made in the Sixth Five Year Plan,
the condition of women will continue to decline notwithstanding
constitutional pledges of equality and justice and the parliamentary
mandate for removal of disparities and discrimination (All India
Women’s Conference, 1980.). The situation has not changed much
even after the recent Five Year Plan.

Critique of Development
Another major critique of the models of development is concerned
with its limited range as it confines to the upper and the lower middle
class women as its target group (Chaudhuri, 2004, p. xi-xlvi) . These
sections were the major beneficiaries of the women’s welfare
programmes such as entry into the higher education and the new
employment markets. On the other hand, the introduction of the
modern technologies disrupted women’s comparative autonomy in
the traditional economic framework and endangered women’s
conditions in the unorganized sectors. The state-sponsored welfare
programmes did not only marginalize the vast sections of the poor
and rural women, it created the illusion of the rapid development of
women. It also led to the false glorification of Indian women who
differentiated themselves from their western counterparts in their
effective management of their double role-as a home-maker and as a
public figure, thus acquiescing to the traditional patriarchal concept
of ‘Indian woman’.

Revisiting the Towards Equality Report

Besides a deep engagement with the notion of the economic
development of women, the revisiting on the Towards Equality
Report in the book, Towards Equality: The Unfinished Agenda, the
Status of Women in India (Gopalan 2001), navigates towards the loss
of the political perspective on the issue of gender equality within the
212 DYNAMICS OF DEVELOPMENT AND DISCONTENT

governmental strategy. In fact, the notion of the politics of the gender

equality was not the point of reference in the CSWI Report. Rather
the whole focus circulated around the social status, employment and
education. It is adequately pointed out by Vina Mazumdar in the
essay, ‘The Making of a Founding Text’ (Mazumdar, 2008, p.27-32).
The consolidation of the focus on the rural areas in the Report glossed
over various newer forms of discrimination that is working in the
urban areas. The issue of dowry was mentioned in the Report but
what was lacking was the dowry as one of the major form of sexual
violence that is rampant in the present Indian society. The newer
ramifications of violence against women remain also outside the
purview of the state-policies.
The notion of equality should also be problematised in this
context. Does this equality mean sameness- a same status enjoyed by
women as that of men? Or does it refer to a completely different
notion of women’s identity? Is there a unified universal notion of
equality in the socio-cultural diversities in the country like India?
These become important issues in question as the CSWI Report failed
to problematise the notion of equality and in very complacent way
neglected the issue of diversity.
The forces of modernity in the post-independence India have
colluded with the traditional hierarchical patriarchy to subsume the
notions of women’s development. Thus, even within the rubric of
the ‘modern’ India, the forces of inequality, which are immanent
within the structure, renew itself in more subtle forms of coercion
(Banerjee, et al, 2011, p. xxi-xxx). The constitutional promise of
equality of rights and justice also remaines unattained to the greater
section of women in India. In fact, the governmentality of this state
creates a discursive double bind for the women in a way so that on
the one hand, they remain unconscious about their constitutional
rights, and on the other the notion of social responsibility which is
closely associated with the concept of rights is also outside their
perspective (Menon, 2004, p. 1-3). The self-imposed restrictions on
the Committee not to be influenced by the global forces, the condition
of women in other countries and the international feminist movements
also contributed to manufacturing a faulty perspective on the real
condition of women in India.
WOMEN AND DEVELOPMENT: REVISITING THE TOWARDS EQUALITY REPORT 213

Gender Discrimination and Women in Development

Gender discrimination still remains an important point of concern in
the broad perspective of development in India. This CSWI Report
triggered off various women’s movements demanding changes in
development policies and government strategies to bring in a pro-
women development model. But in spite of some strategic
adjustments, the situation of women’s development changes a little.
After the advent of liberalisation and the global economic forces,
women as economic beings have undergone a neo-imperialist
patriarchal process of subjugation and marginalisation. The promotion
of consumerist life-style through the mass media advertises a model
of pseudo-development of women’s condition as such life-style traps
women into the stereotype of being only the objects and subjects of
consumerism, which denies the inclusive development of women as
economic beings and as individuals. This ultimately leads to the
increasing sexual violence both in the public and the private sphere.
Though various women’s organizations and the women’s movements
continue to critique this model of development promoted by
globalization and the macro-policies of the government which
reinforce the marginalization of women in the processes of
development, the gender depravity tightens its hold in the whole
scenario of development.

Sexual Violence and Women’s Development

Sexual violence against women is touching new level of astringency
which behoves of an immediate critical intervention into the structural
grids that have made such violence rampant in the public and private
sphere. The growing visibility of sexual violence including rape
questions the role of the state in controlling such crimes. In fact a
genealogical study of the reports provided by the National Crime
Record Bureau over these years shows a continuous increase in the
numbers of sexual violence against women. Does the state perform a
collusive role in withdrawing itself from selected issues of gender
violence to preserve its masculine bias in its development policies?
Or is the responsibility of the State now made limited within
ratification of law, not its effective execution, as was also reflected in
the constitutional promise of equality, but not in its effective
enactment? There is an increasing demand for stringent laws, for
214 DYNAMICS OF DEVELOPMENT AND DISCONTENT

vigilant policing machinery. In fact, the question of protection of

women is widely perceived now as a question of how ably state can
intervene. This also questions the efficacy of the state development
machinery. This is a demand which was also germane back in the
1990s, but the point is that this intervention is not free of larger
Panopticon formation where the body of the women could well
become an object of otherisation and graver surveillance. However,
another way of looking at this spectrum, the argument that supports
and calls for such state intervention, is that the structure that is
patriarchal in content and intension, could be dissented and
subsequently rendered to bend a little bit, thereby clearing a little
space for equality through the body of legislation and execution itself.
Even if this logic cannot be totally washed off, the issue of sexual
violence poses to be caught in this question on state’s responsibilities
vis-a-vis the actual objective of restoring the balance in the power
distribution between genders. Question is the structure that has
spread a wide network of immunity against such violence by evoking
diverse arguments of ethics and morality, responsibility and ‘laxman
rekha’, can at all deliver an answer, or these protest outcries are
becoming victim to the another State politics which need such issues
to surface to prove their concern and to win the support of the
electorate. So the mutual dependency of women and the postcolonial
state on each other cannot be denied. Rajeswai Sunder Rajan in her
work explores this relationship between women as citizens and India
as a postcolonial state in a more critical way (Rajan, 2008, p. 1-37).
Can any design or structural diagnosis be made by engaging with
these instances, by kind of historicising the present impasse between
the roles of state vis-a-vis women’s development? It entails Focauldian
theorization of the bio-power as it addresses this correlation between
the increasing state intervention and its possible pitfalls in this
pervasive expansion of surveillance mechanism.
There are two points involved in it, the first is whether the family
unit is a possible resistant outfit to successfully stall this bio-power,
or is it becoming more and more complicit with the State in
perpetuating it. If the later is true, it is justified to interrogate the
foundation of the family vis-a-vis women’s development. When
women belonging to middle-class family in West Bengal venture to
explore new avenues for socio-economic, cultural and political
mobility, they realise the limitation of the state which poses ‘conflicts
WOMEN AND DEVELOPMENT: REVISITING THE TOWARDS EQUALITY REPORT 215

between their new rights and the values carefully promoted by a

long-standing social-hierarchy’(Agnihotri and Mazumdar , 1995. pp
1869-78). Ironically enough, the family becomes the site of
reinforcement of this ‘long-standing social hierarchy’. It necessitates
an overhaul of the existing model of women’s development.

Conclusion
After arriving on the verge of 40th anniversary of the pioneering
Towards Equality Report, it is significant to revisit the Report which
mirrors for the first time the shocking lapses in women’s
development, even after independence. It cannot be denied that the
development strategy in India has conferred little benefit to women.
It gives birth to the discontents of the women citizens. So what is
needed is restructuring and rerouting of the models of women’s
development from the grassroots level to reach the long-awaited
goals of equality. The journey towards equality is still unaccomplished.

References
Agnihotri, Indu and Mazumdar, Vina (1995): ‘Changing Terms of Political
Discourse: Women’s Movement in India, 1970s-1990s’. Economic and Political
Weekly, 22 July 1995. pp 1869-78.
All India Women’s Conference, (1980): Indian Women in the 1980s: Development
Imperatives, New Delhi.
Banerjee, Nirmala, Samita Sen and Nandita Dhawan, (2011): eds. Mapping the
Field: Gender Relations in Contemporary India, Vol.1 and 2. School of Women’s
Studies, Jadavpur University and Stree, Kolkata.
Chaudhury, Maitrayee (ed.) (2004): Feminism in India, Kali for Women and Women
Unlimited, New Delhi.
Gopalan, Sarla, (2001): Towards Equality: The Unfinished Agenda, the Status of Women
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216 DYNAMICS OF DEVELOPMENT AND DISCONTENT

Sharma, Kumud and Sujaya C.P. (2012): edited. Towards Equality: Report of the
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