Mathur Ritika Passi

of this chapter, the SDG 5 targets that are
most pertinent to India’s policy environment
will be examined from among these
categories. The key conversations that India
needs to have to internalise this goal will
also be highlighted.
Building on MDG 3
While India has achieved some MDG
targets, and has come close to achieving
others, social, economic and political
empowerment of women remains a major
development challenge. As the MDGs
expire this year, it is crucial to determine
how gender equality and women’s empowerment
have been and can be incorporated
within national strategies and programmes.
It is also important to analyse how the gaps
identified through the MDG experience
are relevant to the gender SDG, and how
gender crosscuts other SDGs.
As mentioned earlier, MDG 3 had one
target (3A), which was to achieve gender
parity in primary and secondary education.
India has made considerable progress in
achieving gender parity in primary education
since the introduction of the Right
to Education Act. 3 But for Indian women,
access to educational institutions is a challenge
due to restrictions on mobility and
cultural biases. Additionally, due to the
non-availability of safe sanitation facilities,
gender-sensitive infrastructure and adequate
teacher training, disparities remain in terms
of outcomes and opportunities for women. 3
Moreover, the MDG indicator for target 3A
was in itself inadequate to measure progress
on this front. The indicator 3.1,“ratios of
girls to boys in primary, secondary and
tertiary education,” 4 being purely quantitative
in nature, failed to distinguish between
education and enrolment. Therefore, while
it could measure if an equal proportion of
boys and girls were enrolled in primary
education, it could not monitor the disparity
in the quality of education received.
The SDGs aim to overcome these shortcomings
related to gender. First, the stand-alone
goal on education (SDG 4) is accompanied
by indicators that explicitly mention “boys
and girls.” The goal also includes a target
dedicated to eliminating gender disparities
in education and ensuring equal access. 5
Second, SDG 5 also incorporates education
under the broad target 5.1: “end all
forms of discrimination against women and
girls everywhere.” The proposed indicators
within this target focus on the primary
and secondary ‘completion’ rates of girls
and boys. In India, large numbers of girls
drop out due to cultural biases or lack of
supportive infrastructure; therefore, it is
more important to concentrate on completion
rates, rather than enrolment rates. This
development implies that India needs to reassess
its education policies for girls, focusing
not only at enrolling them into primary
education, but also at facilitating their entry
into higher education in large numbers.
The other two MDG indicators, 3.2: “Share
of women in wage employment in the nonagricultural
sector,” and 3.3: “Proportion of
seats held by women in national parliament,”
were distinct from each other in the
way that the former was tougher to calculate
while progress in the latter could easily
be quantified and assessed. India continues
to perform modestly on these indicators of
women’s economic participation and political
leadership. The Inter Parliamentary Union
ranks India at the 105th position with
12% women in the national parliament. At
present the parliament comprises of only
65 female representatives out of 543 in the
lower house, and 31 female parliamentarians
out of 243 in the upper house. 6
While the representation of women in the
national parliament was an indicator within
the overreaching educational gender-parity
target of MDG 3, SDG 5 recognises the
importance of “women’s full and effective
participation and equal opportunities for
leadership at all levels of decision-making
in political, economic and public life” by
making it a separate target. A significant
difference is that while MDG 3.3 aimed
at achieving 50% women’s representation
in the parliament, the SDG indicator for
this target has been modified to include
“percentage of seats held by women and
minorities in national parliament and/or
sub-national elected office according to
their respective share of the population.”
The modification may create a situation of
skewed representation across countries, as
it allows room for manoeuvring instead of
the initial, instinctive push for global parity
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