Women's Reservation Bill

Women's Reservation Bill or the The Constitution (108th Amendment) Bill, is a pending bill in India which proposes to provide 'thirty three per cent of all seats in the Lower house of Parliament of India the Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies shall be reserved for women. The Upper House Rajya Sabha passed it on 9 Mar 2010.

The seats to be reserved in rotation will be determined by draw of lots in such a way that a seat shall be reserved only once in three consecutive general elections.

Women's reservations
Women get 33 percent reservation in gram panchayat (meaning village assembly, which is a form of local village government) and municipal elections. There is a long-term plan to extend this reservation to parliament and legislative assemblies. In addition, women in India get reservation or preferential treatments in education and jobs. Certain men consider this preferential treatment of women in India as discrimination against them in admissions to schools, colleges, and universities. For instance, several law schools in India have a 30% reservation for females. Progressive political opinion in India is strongly in favour of providing preferential treatment to women in order to create a level playing field for all of its citizens.

The Women


 * More women participation in politics and society.
 * Social norms in India strongly favour men, therefore, reservation for women is expected to create equal opportunity for men and women.
 * Due to female foeticide .infantacide and issues related to women's health, sex ratio in India is alarming at 1.06 males per female. . It is expected this will change the society to give equal status to women.
 * Women are supposedly more resistant to corruption. Therefore, this bill might prove to be a factor restraining the growth of corruption.
 * Women will get 33% reservation after this bill is passed and condition of women will improve.

Possible drawbacks
Passing the Women’ Reservation Bill may cause bias in the democratic process because of the following reasons:


 * It may hurt the self respect of women who have come up on their own ability, it may result in lesser respect for women in the society. It may also bring down the quality of leaders.


 * Parties will be forced to find women whether or not the women identify with the overall party agenda and the rest of the issues concerning all citizens, as opposed to just women’s issues. There are no provisions to prevent discrimination against men because of finding women who are inclined towards women’s issues alone, or, in other words, biased against men.
 * Powerful male members of parties will be tempted to find female relatives to ‘reserve’ the seat for themselves during the following cycle.


 * It is feared that reservation would only help women of the elitist groups to gain seats, therefore causing further discrimination and under-representation to the poor and backward classes (According to a National Election Study, 68 per cent of today's women MPs are millionairesses).