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Keywords: State Of The Nation, Women

The image of a somewhat dazed president, who has lived every bit her image of being harmless, going through the motions of the Republic Day salute is unlikely to be the stuff historic occasions are made of.

The standardised drill of a lifeless ritual reduced what could have been a historic occasion into an event that barely marked the presence of a woman as the head of the state.

The sheer tokenism of it pressed a question: what did this ritual change symbolise? Did this symbolic change in some ways mark the more profound change in the status of Indian woman, a woman who wears a new attitude, a new confidence and a new dress? The Indian Express-CNN-IBN –CSDS State of the Nation Survey interviewed about 4,000 women to get insights into this big question.

The answer has to be ambivalent if we go by women’s reaction to Pratibha Patil. Only two out of every five women had heard her name. The figure would have gone further down if we had not over-sampled urban women in this survey. More women recognise Lata Mangeshkar or Mayawati than Pratibha Patil. When told that a woman was now the President, women did feel good, but not quite ecstatic. Educated women, more in villages than in the metros, reacted more warmly to a woman president. But clearly the first woman president is not, at least not yet, quite a women’s president.

A focus on the present serves to remind us of the challenges that still lie ahead for the Indian women. We quizzed them in detail about several aspects of their life to find out if they could take these decisions on their own or if the decisions were taken by men in their family with or without consulting them. Generally no more than one-third women could take independent decisions about matters that affected them and their family:

-- Women in cities had greater say than their rural counterparts in purchase of household durables, but being working women helped in both settings.

-- When it came to their own education, a majority of women could not take independent decisions; even in the metros the figure barely touched the half way mark.

-- The situation was no better regarding the decision to work: a majority of the highly educated young women said that they could not take this decision of their own.

-- If they do get to work and earn, their say goes up in how their earning is to be used; the higher the earning, the greater the say that woman has in how to spend it.

-- The decision regarding marriage was where the voice of the woman was the weakest. Only one-fifth of the unmarried women felt confident that they could take this decision on their own. In this respect the women in the North East were much better off and those in the north Indian states were the worst off.

-- Interestingly, the one decision in which women report a greater autonomy is about voting, perhaps because this decision was ‘external’ and secret.