In the last few weeks, several parties including the BJD and the BRS have demanded reviving the bill, while Congress also passed a resolution at its Hyderabad Congress Working Committee meeting on Sunday. New Delhi: The Union Cabinet has cleared the Women’s reservation bill, said sources. The development comes amid a special five-day session of the Parliament. Women MPs account for less than 15 per cent of Lok Sabha strength while their representation is below 10 per cent in many state assemblies, data shows for the women reservation bill pending for nearly 27 years.
The last concrete development on the issue was in 2010 when Rajya Sabha passed the bill amid marshals escorting out some MPs who opposed the move to reserve 33 per cent seats for women in Lok Sabha and state assemblies, but the bill lapsed as it could not be passed by Lok Sabha.
While the BJP and the Congress have always supported the bill, opposition by other parties and demands from some for quota for backward classes within the women’s quota have been key sticking points.
Several parties on Sunday made a strong pitch for bringing and passing the women’s reservation bill in the five-day Parliament session beginning Monday, but the government said an “appropriate decision will be taken at the appropriate time”.
In the present Lok Sabha, 78 women members were elected which account for less than 15 per cent of the total strength of 543.
In Rajya Sabha too, women’s representation is about 14 per cent, according to the data shared by the government with Parliament last December.
Several state assemblies have less than 10 per cent women representation, including Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Goa, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya, Odisha, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Tripura and Puducherry.
Bihar, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttrakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi had 10-12 per cent women MLAs, according to the government data of December 2022. Chattisgarh, West Bengal and Jharkhand led the charts with 14.44 per cent, 13.7 per cent and 12.35 per cent women MLAs, respectively.
In the last few weeks, several parties including the BJD and the BRS have demanded reviving the bill, while Congress also passed a resolution at its Hyderabad Congress Working Committee meeting on Sunday.
While it’s not known what percentage of reservation can be proposed in a new bill, the 2008 Bill, which was passed in Rajya Sabha in 2010 before it lapsed following the dissolution of Lok Sabha, proposed reserving one-third of all seats in Lok Sabha and legislative assemblies in each state for women. The UPA was in power when the last attempt was made to pass the bill.
According to a write-up available on PRS Legislative, it also proposed quota-within-quota for SCs, STs and Anglo-Indians, while reserved seats were to be rotated after each general election.
It meant that after a cycle of three elections, all constituencies would have been reserved once.
The reservation was to be operational for 15 years.
Before the failed attempt of 2008-2010, the issue had a chequered history as a similar bill was introduced in 1996, 1998 and 1999.
A Joint Parliamentary Committee chaired by Geeta Mukherjee had examined the 1996 Bill and made seven recommendations.
Five of these were included in the 2008 Bill, including the 15-year reservation period and sub-reservation for Anglo Indians.
These also included reservation in cases where a state has less than three seats in Lok Sabha (or less than three seats for SCs/STs); reservation for the Delhi assembly; and changing “not less than one-third” to “as nearly as may be, one-third”.
Two of the recommendations were not incorporated in the 2008 Bill; the first was for reserving seats in Rajya Sabha and Legislative Councils and the second was for sub-reservation for OBC women after the Constitution extends reservation to OBCs.
The 2008 Bill was referred to the Standing Committee on Law and Justice, but it failed to reach a consensus in its final report.
The Committee recommended that the Bill “be passed in Parliament and put in action without further delay”.
Two members of the Committee, Virender Bhatia and Shailendra Kumar (both belonging to the Samajwadi Party) dissented stating that they were not against providing reservation to women but disagreed with the way this Bill was drafted.
source ndtv