The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) from Kalkaji on Friday presented Delhi Government’s initiatives on empowering women addressing global forum ‘United Cities and Local Governments’ event entitled, ‘Feminist Municipal Movement: Creating Caring Cities.’
Sharing the impact of necessary policy intervention on the empowerment of women in the last six years in Delhi, she said, “Education and healthcare have been the biggest policy priorities of Delhi government in the last six years. 25% of Delhi’s state budget is invested into education and around 15% to 17% goes into healthcare.”
She further stated that, “The shift towards private education leads to the exclusion of girls from high quality education. However, in the last six years, with systematic investment in the infrastructure of schools, ensuring adequate number of teachers, improving quality of teaching, running remedial programmes, there has been a turnaround of the public education system in Delhi.
The transformation has been such that the public schools are outperforming the private schools for the last four years in the national capital.”
“The greatest impact of this intervention has been for girls. Six years ago, girls studying in public school did not even have drinking water or clean toilets. In these six years, the biggest transformation can be observed in the body language of girls. Earlier, they would not even make eye contact. But now, they are more confident, performing well and are speaking their minds on stage in front of the entire school assembly”, she added.
Atishi also stated that, “When public healthcare is in a decline, the first people who fall out of the circle of good quality healthcare are women.” Hence, to address the problem of affordable healthcare facilities, the Delhi government started creating Mohalla clinics for low-income groups, especially women. “A think-tank group that conducted a study of Mohalla clinics found that 85 per cent of the patients going into these clinics are women”, she added.