Empower Elected Women to Curb 'Sarpanch Patis', says Parliamentary Panel

By: WE Team | Monday, 10 April 2023

A parliamentary panel’s report hashighlighted the need to focus on empowering women elected representatives (ERs) in panchayatiraj institutions (PRIs) in order to overcome existing concepts such as ‘SarpanchPati’ or ‘Pradhan Pati’ (husbands trying to act as proxy for elected women sarpanches).  The report has said that women must undergo training and capacity building to become empowered and thus curb such concepts.

Chaired by Lok Sabha MP, Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, the 31-member parliamentary standing committee on rural development and panchayati raj has made several observations. The primary one being that although there is provision for reservation of women in PRIs, in order to really empower women representatives at panchayat level,the need is to empower women financially to facilitate independent decision making.

The report said, “To curb prevalent concepts like sarpanch/pradhanpati (husband of woman Sarpanch) in Panchayati Raj Institutions, the committee strongly recommend that the ministry should take concerted efforts for increasing capacity building and training of women representatives of PRIs so that they can function independently without influence and help of others.”                    

The committee has recommended that all capacity building programmesmust have a fixed percentage of women ER participants. The committee’s report about demands for grants for 2023-24 for the ministry of panchayati raj has made observations and recommendations to focus on women’s training under the Rastriya Gram Swaraj Abhiyan. To this end, the ministry stated that on January 21, over 15. 1 lakh ERs, panchayat functionaries and other stakeholders were trained for the financial year 2022-23. The ministry of panchayati raj, also stated that “starting from this year, there is a special thrust on institutionalising MahilaSabhas and Bal Sabhas”.

According to the recently released government report, ‘Women and Menin India 2022’, data from the panchayati raj ministry, as of last year, of the total 31. 8 lakh elected representatives, nearly 46 percent were women.