Now, women outperform men as voters: Sushil Chandra

New Delhi: Chief Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra said on Friday after seven decades and 17 General Elections since Independence, women's participation in India has exceeded that of men and stood at more than 67 percent in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Addressing an international webinar on ‘Enhancing Electoral Participation of Women, Persons with Disabilities and Senior Citizens', Chandra narrated how the Election Commission made special efforts to enhance the participation on women, people with disabilities, senior citizens and transgenders.

“Gender gap, a crucial parameter, which was -16.71% in 1962, has not only closed but reversed to +0.17% in 2019. In fact India has witnessed a 235.72% increase in female electors since the 1971 elections,” he said. The poll panel, Chandra said, has made consistent efforts and has gone that extra mile to empower and facilitate the



participation of senior citizens and persons with disabilities.  

In most countries and territories, voting rights were granted to women in a piecemeal manner, he observed. The United States took 144 years to give equal voting rights to women, he pointed out.

In India, women got the right to vote the year the country was born. This does not obliviate the fact that many Indian women campaigned for equal right to vote. The Indian suffragette movement gathered momentum with the participation of more and more women in the freedom struggle, he said.

The real logistics issue came up in the preparation of electoral rolls when a large number of women, owing to customary practice, refused to disclose their own names and wanted to be registered as A's wife or B's mother, he recalled.