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Pink-Color Economic Survey 2017-18 Highlights Gender Issues Against Backdrop of Development Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao; Sukanya Samridhi Yojana and Mandatory Maternity Leave are all Steps in Right Direction, Acknowledges Survey
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....ink-Color Economic Survey 2017-18 Highlights Gender Issues Against Backdrop of Development Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao; Sukanya Samridhi Yojana and Mandatory Maternity Leave are all Steps in Right Direction, Acknowledges Survey <br>Corp. Laws, SEBI & IBC<br>Dated:- 29-1-2018<br><BR>The Pink-color Economic Survey 2017-18 tabled in Parliament today by the Union Minister for Finance and Corporate Affairs, Shri Arun Jaitley lays special emphasis on Gender and Son meta-preference, while providing an assessment of India's performance on gender outcomes relative to other economies. The Survey takes into account that Gender equality is an inherently multi-dimensional issue. Accordingly, assessments have been made based on three specifi....
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....c dimensions of gender, ie Agency (relates to women's ability to make decisions on reproduction, spending on themselves, spending on their households and their own mobility and health), Attitudes (relate to attitudes about violence against women/wives, and the ideal number of daughters preferred relative to the ideal number of sons) and Outcomes (relate to 'son preference' measured by sex ratio of last child, female employment, choice of contraception, education level, age at marriage, age at first birth and physical or sexual violence experienced by women) which aim to reflect the status, role and empowerment of women in the society. The key findings of the assessment made in the Survey include: Over the last 10-15 years, India'....
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....s performance improved on 14 out of 17 indicators of women's agency, attitudes, and outcomes. On seven of them, the improvement has been such that India's situation is comparable to that of a cohort of countries after accounting for levels of development. The Survey encouragingly notes that gender outcomes exhibit a convergence pattern, improving with wealth to a greater extent in India than in similar countries so that even where it is lagging, it can expect to catch up over time. The Survey, however, cautions that on several other indicators, notably employment, use of reversible contraception, and son preference, India has some distance to traverse because development has not proved to be an antidote. Economic Survey 2017-18 states tha....
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....t within India, there is significant heterogeneity, with the North-Eastern states (a model for the rest of the country) consistently out-performing others and not because they are richer; hinterland states are lagging behind but the surprise is that some southern states do less well than their development levels would suggest. The Economic Survey 2017-18 notes the challenge of gender is long-standing, probably going back millennia, so all stakeholders are collectively responsible for its resolution. The Survey thus recommends that India must confront the societal preference, even meta-preference for a son, which appears inoculated to development. The skewed sex ratio in favor of males led to the identification of "missing" women. But ther....
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....e may be a meta-preference manifesting itself in fertility stopping rules contingent on the sex of the last child, which notionally creates "unwanted" girls, estimated at about 21 million, adds the Survey. Consigning these odious categories to history soon should be society's objective, opines the Survey. The survey acknowledges that government's Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao and Sukanya Samridhi Yojanaschemes, and mandatory maternity leave rules are all steps in the right direction. The Survey states that just as India has committed to moving up the ranks in Ease of Doing Business indicators, a similar commitment should be endeavored on the gender front. ============= Document 1 Table 1. Summary of Resu....
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....lts (1) (2) (3) India India Change (4) Is India an 2005-06 Gender Dimension Specific Issue 2015-16 Outlier for (2)-(1) (Women's Responses) (%) (%) its level of wealth' in 2015? 1 Agency Involved in decisions about their own health 62.3 74.5 12.2 8.2 2 Agency Involved in decisions about large household purchases 52.9 73.4 20.4 9.6 3 Agency Involved in decisions about visits to family and relatives 60.5 74.6 14.1 4.1 45 Agency Involved in decisions about their own earnings 82.1 82.1 -0.1 -7.4 Agency Involved in decisions about contraception 93.3 91.6 -1.7 0.1 6 Attitude Prefer more or equal number of daughters over 74.5 78.7 4.3 -4.4 sons 7 7 Attitude Wife beating is not acce....
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....ptable 50.4 54.0 3.5 -2.7 8 Outcome Using reversible contraception, if using any method of contraception 33.8 32.8 -1.0 -51.6 9 Outcome Employed" 36.3 24.0 -12.3 -26.0 10 Outcome Employed in non-manual sector" 18.9 28.2 9.3 -19.8 11 Outcome Earning more than or equal to husband 21.2 42.8 21.6 -7.4 12 Outcome Educated 59.4 72.5 13.1 -6.8 13 Outcome Not experiencing physical or emotional violence 62.6 70.5 7.8 0.3 14 Outcome Not experiencing sexual violence 90.3 93.6 3.3 1.7 15 Outcome Median age at first child birth* 19.3 20.6 1.3 0.4 16 Outcome Median age at first marriage* 17.3 18.6 1.3 -0.4 17 Outcome Sex ratio of last birth² (females per hundred births) 39.4 39.0 -0....
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.....4 -9.5 Age is in years and is for year 1998-99. "All questions/responses are reported so that positive numbers denote greater female empowerment. **These dimensions are calculated for the set of all women between 15-49. All other dimensions are calculated for married women between the ages of 15 and 49. In column 4, the numbers represent the extent to which India is an outlier, positive or negative. They derive from the regression equation estimated at household level in Annex 1. All numbers represent percentage points difference from the average estimated relationship, except for the numbers in rows 15 and 16 where they refer to number of years. Numbers in bold are statistically significant. Source: Survey calculations based on D....
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....HS and NFHS data.<BR> News - Press release - PIB....