Opinion: India’s Women Are Advancing, Whether the World Notices Or Not

Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra

India is also showing the world how women can take the lead in handling newer tools and technologies

For the better part of the 20th and 21st centuries, India served as the default cautionary tale in Western discourse on women’s rights. Op-ed writers in London and New York positioned the country as a danger zone. NGO reports framed it as a laboratory of patriarchal dysfunction.

The narrative became so entrenched that it drowned out an inconvenient reality: India has been working with a laser-eyed focus on uplifting the lives of women. Since 2014 alone, Prime Minister Modi’s government has driven measurable and even large-scale improvements in nearly every indicator that matters for women’s safety, economic participation and political representation.

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The numbers do not lie, even when the commentary does.

Between 2017 and 2024, female labour force participation in India nearly doubled, climbing from 23.3 percent to 41.7 percent. In rural areas, the jump was even sharper: from 24.6 percent to 47.6 percent. That was a 69 percent surge that outpaced every other BRICS nation. Brazil, China and Russia saw stagnation or decline in the same period. India recorded the highest growth.

Meanwhile, India’s Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) has shown a significant decline since 2014, dropping from 130 per lakh live births in 2014 to 88 per lakh live births in 2022 – a 86 percent reduction. Eight Indian states now meet the UN Sustainable Development Goal target of 70 or below. Institutional births have risen from 79 percent to 89 percent, indicating that women in India have access to better health and maternal care facilities. India’s share of global maternal deaths has fallen to about 7.2 per cent, down from higher levels that once defined the country’s health profile.

School enrolment figures tell a similar story. Girls now account for 48.3 percent of India’s 24.69 crore students, nearly at parity with boys. For the first time, India’s teaching workforce has crossed the 10 million mark, and women are leading the charge at 54.2%.

The Swachh Bharat Mission has constructed over 100 million household toilets since 2014. A direct consequence of this initiative has been 500 million people across 630,000 villages – especially women – getting a life of dignity they previously thought was impossible to achieve. That investment of Rs 1.4 lakh crore changed daily realities for women who had previously faced violence and humiliation while defecating in the open. Surveys found that 93 percent of women reported feeling safer after toilets got built. Sexual assault incidents fell by 25 per million between 2014 and 2016, a decline researchers have directly linked to improved sanitation access.

The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, meanwhile, has delivered 10.6 crore free LPG connections to women from poor households. The programme was launched in May 2016 to replace smoky chulhas that dominated India’s rural landscape. The government spent Rs 52,000 crore and provided cylinders at subsidised rates of Rs 553, lower than prices in many LPG-producing countries. Recent International Energy Agency (IEA) data notes that India has halved its population without clean cooking access since 2010.

Under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, the government made female ownership or co-ownership of houses mandatory. As result, 74 percent of rural homes built under the scheme have women as sole or joint owners. The second phase aims for 100 percent women ownership across two crore new houses. That provision does more than put names on property documents. It gives women legal standing, economic security and leverage in family decisions.

The Lakhpati Didi initiative has mobilised 10.05 crore women into 90.86 lakh Self-Help Groups and helped nearly 1.5 crore of them earn annual incomes exceeding Rs 1 lakh. The programme combines skill training, business planning, credit linkages and market access. The government has now set a target of three crore Lakhpati Didis and allocated Rs 15,047 crore in the 2024-25 budget to reach it.

India is also showing the world how women can take the lead in handling newer tools and technologies. The Namo Drone Didi scheme has added a technology edge for Indian women. The scheme provided 15,000 drones to women SHGs with an 80 percent subsidy. Women received 15 days of pilot training and five days of assistant training. The drones offered rental services to farmers for spraying fertilisers and pesticides.

When it comes to political representation for women, India has left many in the developed and world far being. In September 2023, India’s Parliament passed the 128th Constitutional Amendment, reserving 33 percent of seats in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies for women. The law is awaiting implementation until delimitation, but once effective, it would lift women’s representation from the current 13.8 percent to a guaranteed 181 MPs out of 543. That 33 percent mandate exceeded the actual representation in the United States (28.9 percent), Germany (32.4 percent), Italy (32.8 percent) and matched or bettered most Western democracies.

However, commentary from the West routinely ignores all the strides India has made to improve women’s lives.

None of those critiques acknowledged the systematic and structural interventions underway. They fixated on individual crimes, real and horrifying, while erasing the policy frameworks that moved tens of millions of women from exclusion to participation. But presenting those incidents as the whole story while ignoring maternal mortality declines, toilet construction, LPG distribution, labour force entry and legislated political representation distorted reality beyond recognition.

Western media applied one lens to India and another to themselves. When European countries debated gender quotas or the US struggled to push women’s representation past 29 percent, the framing emphasised complexity, political constraints and incremental progress. When India legislated a 33 percent quota, the coverage focused on delays in implementation and questioned political motives. When maternal mortality remained high in parts of the United States, especially among Black women, reports treated it as a policy challenge requiring solutions. When India cut its maternal mortality ratio by 86 percent, faster than the global average, the achievement went largely unmentioned in international commentary.

Modi has made women central to governance in ways that move beyond rhetoric. Lakhpati Didis, Drone Didis, LPG connections, housing titles in women’s names and mandated parliamentary seats are all part of a coherent strategy to uplift women. The scale dwarfs anything attempted in most democracies. Over 100 million toilets represented the largest sanitation drive in history. Over 10 crore LPG connections constituted the world’s biggest clean energy transition for households. Mobilising 10 crore women into SHGs created the largest women’s economic network anywhere.

Do problems remain? Obviously. Violence against women persists. Gender gaps in wages and senior positions endure. Rural-urban divides continue to shape access to services. But acknowledging those gaps did not require ignoring what changed. The same Western outlets that devoted pages to attacks on minorities and women in India rarely covered the data on labour force participation, maternal health or sanitation. The narrative convenience of positioning India as a failed state on women’s rights proved stronger than the editorial obligation to report measurable outcomes.

The lesson cut both ways. India should neither dismiss legitimate criticism nor allow external commentary to define its trajectory.

Women’s safety, economic opportunity and political representation demands constant vigilance and continued investment. But the West might reconsider the impulse to lecture a country that legislated better gender representation than most of its critics achieved, cut maternal mortality faster than the global benchmark and enroled girls in school at near parity while building infrastructure that directly improved women’s lives.

The data tells a story that much of the commentary chooses to conveniently ignore.

© News18