Gender and climate change require a holistic understanding. Prioritising gender adaptive strategies is the need of the hour

The presidency of G20 in 2022 has provided India with an opportunity to show her commitment to creating a more gender-inclusive society. This has been ascertained by the theme of India’s G-20 Presidency: ‘Inclusive, Ambitious, Decisive and Action Oriented.’ In line with this commitment, the W20 mission under India’s leadership aims to ‘remove all barriers towards the development of women.’ W20 India has prioritized 5 key areas that can bring it closer to its mission of an equitable order: first women entrepreneurship; second grassroots women leadership; third bridging the gender digital divide; fourth Education and skill development and lastly Climate change. To pursue these goals India has listed the strategies for call for action, collaboration, cooperation, and communication and building consensus for action.

These goals and strategies are the need for the hour and India has already made commendable strides in this direction. The first key area is the Startup India programme, which has a special component for women entrepreneurs. This scheme focuses on the holistic development and strengthening of women's entrepreneurship by creating an enabling network and building a strong ecosystem. Consequently, the government has already taken steps to provide them with easy loans through Mudra Yojna, and Mahila Samriddhi Yojna. The government also train their skills and provides them with platforms like the women entrepreneurship platform and National start-up awards. These steps have proven a huge success in bringing women as entrepreneurs as their numbers have risen from 14 per cent to 20 per cent as per the Bain and Company report published in 2019.

In a recent report published by the National Association for Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) in collaboration with Zinnov, 18 per cent of startups have either women as founders or co-founders. These numbers are important as they are pushing India towards a gender-inclusive economy. Coming to the second priority identified in W20, India has already made a great leap forward when in 1993 it passed the 73rd and 74th Amendment bills and had reserved one-third of the seats for women in both rural and urban local bodies. In 2009, another Amendment was mooted that had pushed these reserved seats for women up to 50 per cent. This is exemplary progress that has spiralled into narrowing the male-female voting percentage in India and in some states, women's voting percentage has overtaken the males. The third priority area is bridging the gender digital divide. This issue has become very stark after the COVID lockdown that has made technology and its ancillary a part of everyday life. Various studies carried out by various organizations have shown that women lag a lot behind men in terms of access to technology. The report also shows that this difference is mainly due to illiteracy and a lack of digital skills. This gap could be lessened by collaborating and cooperating with enterprises that can help provide accessibility to handsets and impart digital knowledge to women. Despite the literacy rate of females increasing steadily their effective participation in the employment rate is abysmal. Data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) (2019-20) found that female labour workforce participation stands at 22.8 per cent compared to 56.8 per cent of male participation.

Imparting women's skills is part of the sustainable development goals. Keeping to its commitment India launched the National Skill Development Mission (NSDM) that focused on women's participation as skilled workforce. As a result of these consistent efforts, 41 per cent of women are part of the CSDE campaign, PMKVY has close to 50 per cent women.

(The writer is an Assistant Professor at, the Department of Political Science, DU, views are personal)