New Delhi, Sept. 25: “Access makes a big difference to women. Getting access to facilities such as education and primary health have multiplier effect… Consultation is not enough… None of us wants token participation… There should be genuine access that makes true contribution,” said Nirmala Sitharaman while releasing the report ‘Status of women’, study was conducted by Drishti Stree Adhyayan Prabhodhan Kendra, a women’s study centre has been working for more than two decades in researching and understanding the vital and important issues regarding women's status in the society.

 

While addressing the event, the RSS Chief, Mohan Bhagwat said, “women are capable of taking care of themselves and men shouldn’t think it is they who know better about how women can make progress.''

He also added, the change for women should begin from each individual home, which makes it an ‘landmark study’.

The Study was conducted across all 29 states and five out of seven Union Territories making it one of the most comprehensive study of women in Bharat in recent times. Women above the 18 years of age were the unit of analysis and total 43255 women were interviewed. A separate study on similar lines was conducted on girls below 18 years of age group. 7675 girls from 5 regions, 25 states, 2 union territories and 283 Districts were interviewed.

Speaking on the occasion, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, “Women need opportunity and access and not token participation.”

Under the survey, 26 separate studies were conducted in addition to the overall assessment of health, education and employment of women.

While Bhagwat advised men to start making such changes at home, if not for the society, Sitharaman said what women needed was not tokenism. “Access makes a big difference to women. Getting access to facilities such as education and primary health have multiplier effect… Consultation is not enough… None of us wants token participation… There should be genuine access that makes true contribution,” she said.

But, she added, one should see how women are using the opportunities. “There are two sides to it. We have laws making it mandatory for women’s participation. To be honest, we don’t get women for them. It’s not because there are not capable women. There are women, but they do not come forward… Women should come out of the comfort zones, they should leave the doubting zones.”

“This widespread survey will be definitely beneficial to central and state govts as well as various voluntary organisations. In addition to education, health, employment and safety, the issues covered in the survey are multi-dimensional such as women in a family to women in politics, women in slums to women in border areas. We have authentic statistics and observations on women in Bharat,” said Anjali Deshpande, Secretary, Drishti.

Other interesting findings are that a sizeable number of women below 25 years of age are entering the spiritual field, and increasing age in getting married is the practice. There is a shift from the joint family structure to nuclear families, though it still exists in western, northeastern regions and Maoist-affected areas of Chhattisgarh. It also found that schemes, voter card, Aadhaar card are implemented more effectively in conflict zone regions, women in employment are still deprived of statutory and non-statutory facilities at workplaces, more than one-tenth of women take only one major ingredient in their meals and that age, education and marital status is related to the level of happiness.