Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Women Development : Problems and Solution perspectives

From my childhood I used to get trained to be fearless and take initiatives by myself. My parents and society around me made sure that I can walk on this world as an independent person. Psychologically whenever I am under pressure, depression etc, then my parents, relatives, friends, colleagues, teachers, villagers, news-papers, TV, other media etc everyone and everything on this list made me to think courageously and move forward in life. This kind of severe training I got it for at least 15 years of my whole childhood life and because of which now I feel strong and think way beyond.

On the other hand, I see that every girl-child around me get trained (during the same period of her life) to feel fear to go out, not to take any initiatives on her own and most importantly not to become an independent person in this world. I am extremely surprised to see that, and very unfortunate, even every mother also trains her girl-child to feel fear & inferior. This is the way, this male dominated society makes women to feel insecure thro various ways and means.

Is there any logic behind this:
Are women weaker than their counterparts, physically?? I don’t answer this but then: Definitely they can’t be weaker than a physically disabled man and in any case assuming there is a weaker person, then society should attempt to make him/her feel courageous but not to teach "how to feel insecure". In fact, society attempts the brave lessons for a physically disabled person but not for a woman. Why??

If you look at society closely: Women are taught to be inferior to Men. Which is nothing but women growth potential is upper bounded by Men. Because of this, our economy gets hurt very badly. Economists count the women while calculating GDP per capita but then society does not give fair opportunities so that they can contribute their part to GDP. Just think this: if we can make women (constituting nearly half of the population) part of GDP then we can achieve GDP growth rate 15%.

Solution perspective:
It is a plain and simple fact that howsoever weak a person is: but if he/she is powered with knowledge then nothing limits them. Of the late, knowledge based revolution is taking place and in this upward society everyone bows to knowledge and “just” to it. So it does not matter whether one has muscle power or not and in fact, it does not matter whether one is physically abled or not. Importantly, this revolution has been bridging the gap between the developed economies and developing economies. All those same advantages of developing economies which made that to happen are very much applicable to traditionally suppressed communities like women, caste based or religion based downtrodden, etc.

Business Perspective:
People who convert the social problems into opportunities are known as social entrepreneurs. In our case, examples are already set. Like Mahesh Bhupati who invested his money on Sania has clicked. Koneru Hampi is another example. Now such investments are required. Though it takes longer time for returns from this type of investments but then these have enormous potential to become multiples.

I have very clear-cut & very practical solutions for this problem. But then very few women, who believe that they are not upper bounded by men, should join this mission (ya, you can say Charlie’s Angels :-) ). So why this attempt of mine.

General request to all:
I hope you all realise this difference that is taking place (knowledge revolution). I request you all to engage in this important discussion so that thousands years of suppression problems get solved.

There is a community in Orkut for this purpose. For the readers, who does not know Orkut: it is a friendship network service of Google (similar to Myspace) and it needs an invitation to start an account. Community is like a yahoo group but discussions are public. If you would like to join this community, then you must have an Orkut account, for which you require an invitation. So you may write to me with all your details for an invitation (my gmail id: malapati). Link to the community: http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=17172270