🔵 The Long Wait for Women’s Representation | Economic and Political Weekly

https://www.epw.in/journal/2023/39/editorials/long-wait-womens-representation.html

It is disappointing that women’s reservations are not being implemented immediately before the 2024 elections.
The Parliament has recently ratified the Constitution (128th Amendment) Bill, 2023 to reserve one-third or 33% of the seats in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies for women. Officially called the “Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam,” the bill was passed with a near unanimous support in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. It mandates that one-third of all seats in the Lok Sabha, state legislative assemblies, and Delhi, which is a union territory with an elected assembly, will be reserved for women.
It also proposed that women will get one-third of the seats allocated for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) on a periodic and rotational basis. With one-third seats being reserved for women in panchayati raj institutions, state assemblies, and the Lok Sabha, India can now boast of having guaranteed women’s representation at almost all institutional levels of its electoral democracy.
The approval of the women’s reservation bill in Parliament was indeed long-pending, and hence is a welcome step in the direction of ensuring women’s political representation. A bill to reserve one-third of the seats for women was first introduced in 1996, and several attempts were made since then to get this bill passed in Parliament. The percentage of women in Parliament is still very low when compared to many other countries, despite considerable improvement over the years. In the Lok Sabha, women make up only around 15% of the members of Parliament (MPs). This is a big increase from the first elected Lok Sabha in 1952, where only 5% of the MPs were women, but it is nevertheless far from the ideal of adequate representation. Data also shows that less than 10% legislators in 20 state assemblies and union territories are women. Such data reveal the coexistence of the contradictory processes of universal adult franchise on the one hand and the sociopolitical disenfranchisement of women on the other. It could be argued that the formal existence of the right to vote proved to be inadequate in providing an equal and commensurate voice to politically disenfranchised groups like women, SCs, and STs, thereby marking the necessity of political reservations for these groups in making our electoral democracy more substantively representative in character.
The euphoria over getting the bill passed with unanimous support in Parliament is severely dampened, when it is noted that women’s reservation will not be implemented in the 2024 general elections. According to the pro­visions of the bill, its implementation shall commence only after the processes of the decennial census and delimitation of seats are completed. Article 82 of the Constitution stipulates that the number of seats in the Lok Sabha should be adjusted according to the population census every 10 years, so that each region can have a fair representation. However, constitutional amendments passed in 1976 and 2001 effectively froze the number of constituencies till 2026. This means that the delimitation exercise can only commence after 2026. Given that the previous delimitation commission took around five years to submit its report, most experts calculate that it is unlikely that the women’s quota will be implemented even in the 2029 Lok Sabha elections.

🔆 Your Goal 🔆

Fill in the blanks

As part of their commitment to __ neutrality, investigators have an ethical obligation to accept research findings even when the data run counter to their personal views or to widely accepted beliefs.

Fill in the blanks

__ refers to the degree to which a measure or scale truly reflects the phenomenon under study.

🔵 Watch | Why is the Hakki Pikki tribal community unhappy with the land given to them? - The Hindu

https://www.thehindu.com/videos/watch-why-is-the-hakki-pikki-tribal-community-unhappy-with-the-land-given-to-them/article67371633.ece

The Hakki Pikkis are traditionally a semi-nomadic tribe of bird catchers and hunters, who settled down in several parts of Karnataka.


In the last 20 years the community left bird catching and hunting, and have started to prepare traditional medicines, especially hair oils. The settlement on the edge of the Bannerghatta National Park has both Hakki Pikki and Iruliga tribals staying here.

In 1962, the Government of Karnataka allotted 350 acres of land for them to sustain themselves through agriculture. But for the longest time, the Forest Department claimed that the tribes were encroachers.

In 1974, the Bannerghatta wooded area was declared as a National Park. This led to the criminalisation of these communities living on the edges of the forest.

The Hindu visited the settlement of around 270 families, and spoke to them about the issues they have with the title deeds which they have received from the Karnataka government.

Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Bawendi had failed Chemistry exam in college

🔆 FOOD FOR THOUGHT 🔆

Why do you think most college students regard binge drinking as a normal rather than a deviant behaviour?

#FoodForThought

🔵 Margarita with a Straw: Female Sexuality, Same Sex Love, and Disability in India | Economic and Political Weekly

https://www.epw.in/engage/article/margarita-straw-female-sexuality-same-sex-love-and#:~:text=Through%20its%20frequent%20attempts%20of,within%20Margarita%20with%20a%20Straw

Do we identify women with disability as sexual beings? Have films reiterated disability and sexuality as incongruent identities, or has the trend been undergoing a transition? Margarita with a Straw (2014) raised these relevant questions about women’s disability and sexuality in India, and further identified the extent to which Bollywood has misconstrued identities and glorified femininity by adding to the negativity associated with women’s disability in India.

🔵 Gandhian concept of village development and India's development policy | Gandhi's Views | Articles on and by Mahatma Gandhi

https://www.mkgandhi.org/articles/village_development.html

Good governance demands respect for human rights, rule of law, strengthening of democracy, promoting transparency and capacity in public administration. The responsiveness of the state and its institutions to the needs and aspirations of the people, and inclusive citizenship are imperative to good governance. Democracy depends upon the equality of all human beings, their right to participate in social and political transformation and the right to development, to live in dignity. Panchayat Raj is a system and process of good governance. Villages have always been the basic units of administration in India since ancient times. The Gram Sabha can become the cornerstone of the whole Panchayat Raj institutional set-up, thereby the Indian democratic system. So in this paper focus is on Gandhian concept of Panchayat Raj. This is useful to development of India. So in 21st century this concept becomes powerful in the Nation.

Importance of Democratic Decentralization:

Gandhi's concept of democratic decentralization bears the stamp of his passionate belief in non-violence, truth and individual freedom. He calls it Panchayati Raj or village Swaraj. He wants to see each village a little republic, self-sufficient in its vital wants, organically and non-hierarchically linked with the larger spatial bodies and enjoying the maximum freedom of deciding the affairs of the locality. Gandhi wanted political power to be distributed among the villages in India. Gandhi preferred the term ‘Swaraj’ to describe what he called true democracy. This democracy is based upon freedom. Individual freedom in Gandhi’s view, could be maintained only in autonomous, self-reliant communities that offer opportunities to the people for fullest participation.1

🔵 Zoom Recording for Sociology Answer Writing

https://vimeo.com/872128477/b934cbb66e?share=copy

🔵 4. Introduction to Queering Gender and Sexuality – Erick Jackaman

https://transingabout.com/trans-studies/queering-gender-sexuality/

What is a queer perspective of gender?

Understanding that gender has multiple meanings eg.
Internal (gender) identity
Outward expressions (of gender)

System of how social life is structured
Gender expressions, norms and identities vary across time, space and culture

The way we experience gender and how gender functions in society is inextricably linked to other aspects of ourselves, such as race, class, disability, age etc.

Gender can be understood as something we “do”, rather than something we are – Candace West and Don Zimmerman

Gender can be understood as “performative”, meaning that it emerges in and through behaviours and interactions rather than those (gendered) behaviours being reflective of an inner gender core – Judith Butler

Gender can be viewed as “biopsychosocial”, that is, continuously understood and (re)produced through interactions between our biological, psychological and social worlds.

Gender is not simply the social counterpart of “biological” sex.
Rather, a queer perspective would view gender and sex as intrinsically interconnected – Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling

Gender is not a binary, but rather encompasses a wide range of expressions, including (but not limited to) femininities, masculinities and non-binary expressions of gender.

#QueerPerspective

🔆 FOOD FOR THOUGHT 🔆

What would happen if present patterns of migration, both internal and international, reversed themselves? How would your hometown change? What would be the effect on the nation's economy? Would your own life change?

#FoodForThought

🔵 Overcast Minds : Caste Consciousness and Academic Performance | Economic and Political Weekly

https://www.epw.in/journal/2021/19/special-articles/overcast-minds.html

Children from historically disadvantaged castes face systemic hurdles in education in India—ill-equipped schools, poorly trained teachers, discrimination—leading to high failure and dropout rates. Children from disadvantaged castes also face subtler psychological impediments. One such impediment is consciousness of negative stereotypes. Via an experiment, this study illustrates how CASTE CONSCIOUSNESS could affect academic performance, and finds that children from disadvantaged castes perform poorly in tests when made aware of their caste and reservation status than otherwise. The study underlines the need for reform in how India implements its reservation policy to narrow some of the inter-caste differences in educational attainment.

Inherited caste identity is known to block the progress of many Indians from historically disadvantaged castes (Thorat and Newman 2009). In the sphere of education—which is critically linked to other life outcomes, such as employment, income, health, and standard of living, disadvantaged castes continue to face hurdles in access to schooling and skill attainment despite remedial affirmative action programmes by the national and state governments.1 Case studies document that schools serving disadvantaged caste communities are poorly staffed, with teachers having inadequate subject knowledge and training (Subramanian 2017). Studies also detail the discrimination children from underprivileged caste groups experience at school, including being segregated during school lunches, denied access to drinking water, subjected to casteist slurs, and asked to do menial tasks seldom asked of pupils from traditionally privileged castes (Balagopalan and Subrahmanian 2003; Nambissan 2009; Subramanian 2017). Children from disadvantaged castes are also known to suffer prejudice within classrooms—with teachers silencing them, and seating them in the back while reserving front seats for students from traditionally privileged castes (Nambissan 2009).

🔵 QUESTION FOR TODAY

Q. "Sociology without History is rootless and History without Sociology is fruitless." Elaborate. (20M)

Please post your answers scanned in black and white mode as PDFs on @SociologyCivils.

Thank you!
@SociologyTasks