Gender Imbalance and Women Empowerment: Some Policy Challenges in the Twelfth Plan

Abstract

The Twelfth Five Year Plan of India, scheduled to begin from April 2012, is supposed to face many policy challenges particularly in the fields of inclusive growth. This paper aims at pointing out the problems related to gender imbalance and women empowerment, as experienced by the Indian economy during the previous plan periods in general and during Eleventh Plan in particular. It also wants to show how far these issues would pose a challenge to the policy framework of the Twelfth Plan.The question of gender balance is often analyzed with the help of sex ratio. The sex ratio in India has been historically negative or in other words, unfavourable to females. It is believed that several factors such as old practice of neglect of girl child and female infanticide, higher mortality rate among the female children, advent of new technology for the determination of the sex of foetus, women literacy rate, poverty rate, workforce participation rate among the women, etc. are responsible for influencing overall sex ratio and the child sex ratio in our country. The analysis has been based upon some secondary data sources, particularly the population census (2011) data.