Is Public Policy Engendered Enough? Case Studies of ‘Towards Equality’ and Mahila Samakhya

Public policy in India has often been described as gender-neutral on paper but gender-blind in practice. For decades, schemes designed to “uplift” women treated them as passive beneficiaries rather than as citizens with agency. Two landmark interventions challenged this assumption in very different ways: the Towards Equality Report of 1974, which forced the state to confront its own blind spots, and the Mahila Samakhya Programme, which tried to embed gender consciousness at the village level. Looking at these two case studies together helps us answer a question that still matters: is our public policy truly engendered, or does it just look that way?

What does it mean to engender a policy? 🔗

To “engender” a policy means to design, implement, and evaluate it through a gender lens. It is not the same as adding a women-only scheme or carving out a separate budget line. A genuinely engendered policy asks how a programme will affect men and women differently because of unequal access to resources, mobility, education, and decision-making power. Gender mainstreaming, as defined in governance literature, is the systematic integration of gender perspectives into all policies, programmes, and activities of government. The idea sounds straightforward, but applying it consistently across ministries, budgets, and field offices has been the harder challenge.

The Towards Equality Report: a turning point in 1974 🔗

The Towards Equality Report was the work of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, set up in 1971 to review the constitutional, legal, and administrative provisions affecting women’s status. The committee was chaired by Phulrenu Guha and included scholars and activists such as Lotika Sarkar, Vina Mazumdar, and Leela Dube. The report was submitted to the Minister for Education and Social Welfare on 31 December 1974, and what it revealed shook the post-Independence consensus that constitutional equality had translated into real progress.

What the report uncovered 🔗

The committee found that 25 years after Independence, the gap between constitutional promises and lived reality was widening. Most disturbingly, the report drew attention to the declining sex ratio, signalling what would later be called the phenomenon of “missing women.” It also documented widespread illiteracy among girls, low participation of women in the workforce, and almost negligible presence in political decision-making. The findings reopened the women’s question for government, academia, and women’s organisations, and the report is considered the foundation of the women’s movement in independent India.

The committee also made an important political recommendation. It proposed that each political party set a quota for women candidates and recommended a Constitutional amendment to reserve seats for women in municipal councils and panchayats. That recommendation took two more decades to materialise as the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments, which reserved one-third of seats for women in local self-government.

Impact on later policy 🔗

The Towards Equality Report fundamentally changed how the state spoke about women. It led to the creation of women’s studies as an academic discipline, the establishment of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, and a shift in the Five Year Plans from “welfare” to “development” and eventually “empowerment.” The Sixth Plan (1980-85) was the first to include a dedicated chapter on women, and the Eighth Plan introduced the idea of channelling benefits to women through their own institutions.

Yet the report’s critique was sharper than the policy response. The report highlighted how state policies failed to achieve constitutional gender equality and criticised prevailing development models for making women’s issues invisible, but subsequent planning continued to focus narrowly on women’s roles rather than their empowerment as economic actors. In other words, the state heard the message about education and health but largely ignored the deeper structural critique about labour, property, and political power.

The Mahila Samakhya Programme: empowerment from below 🔗

If Towards Equality was a top-down audit, Mahila Samakhya was a bottom-up experiment. Launched in 1988 as part of the National Policy on Education of 1986, which attributed gender disparity in education to traditional gender roles and aimed to empower women in local communities to address the underlying issues, the programme rejected the standard model of input-heavy schemes. Instead, it built something that was hard to measure but powerful in practice: women’s collectives.

How the programme worked on the ground 🔗

Mahila Samakhya began as a pilot in six states – Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Bihar, Karnataka, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh – with initial funding from the Government of the Netherlands. Village-level groups called Mahila Sanghas were the basic unit. These were spaces where rural women, often from Dalit and Adivasi communities, could meet, discuss their problems, learn to read and write, and gradually take collective action on issues from alcoholism to wage theft to school enrolment.

Field workers known as sahayoginis facilitated the process. Sahayoginis engaged in extensive dialogue with village women to tailor activities to local needs, ensuring community relevance and ownership, with key interventions including biweekly literacy and adult education classes. Importantly, women’s participation was voluntary, and the agenda was set by the women themselves, not by a planner in Delhi.

Concrete innovations that changed lives 🔗

Over the years, Mahila Samakhya generated several innovations that have since influenced mainstream policy. These include Nari Adalats, women’s courts that mediated disputes around domestic violence, dowry, and property; Mahila Shikshan Kendras, residential bridge schools for adolescent girls who had dropped out; and the model that later became the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya scheme for educating girls from marginalised communities.

By the time the programme matured, it had touched the lives of more than 1.4 million women, built on the premise that true empowerment happens when women themselves define what they need rather than having solutions imposed from above. Independent evaluations consistently noted improvements in women’s mobility, political participation, and willingness to contest panchayat elections in programme districts.

A controversial closure 🔗

Despite this record, the programme was wound down. The government announced that the programme would not be funded after 31 March 2016 and proposed merging it with the National Rural Livelihoods Mission, prompting women’s rights activists and academics to write to the HRD Minister urging retention of its autonomy, citing the 2014 IIM Ahmedabad evaluation which confirmed that Mahila Samakhya had enabled marginalised women to enter the public domain and acquire voice and agency. The closure raised an uncomfortable question: if the programme worked, why was it shut?

One answer is that empowerment is politically inconvenient. Mahila Samakhya was a low-cost programme with an annual budget of only Rs 60-70 crore, yet the government remained unsure about its place in the larger architecture. Programmes that produce assertive women who challenge local power structures do not always sit comfortably with administrators looking for measurable, photogenic outcomes.

Evaluating gender sensitivity in public policy 🔗

Comparing the two case studies brings out the tension at the heart of Indian gender policy. Towards Equality named the problem; Mahila Samakhya tried to act on it. Both made real progress, and both ran into the same wall: the unwillingness of the wider policy machinery to treat gender as a structural issue rather than a sectoral one.

The gains 🔗

The post-1974 decades produced a long list of achievements. The 73rd and 74th Amendments brought women into local governance in significant numbers. Gender budgeting was introduced in 2005-06. Laws against domestic violence, sexual harassment at the workplace, and dowry have been strengthened. Schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, Janani Suraksha Yojana, and the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana have improved indicators of girl-child survival and maternal health.

The gaps 🔗

The shortcomings, however, are visible in the data. Female labour force participation, which stood at 35 per cent in 1990, fell to 20.8 per cent by 2019, even as the country grew richer. Reservation for women in Parliament and state assemblies, recommended by the 1974 report, became law only in 2023 and is yet to take effect. Property rights remain unequally exercised, unpaid care work continues to be invisible in national accounts, and violence against women has not declined despite stronger laws.

Critics argue that gender mainstreaming in India has often been reduced to counting women beneficiaries. Urban development, for instance, is still treated as a gender-neutral domain even though cities have always been designed for men, and meaningful change requires gender-sensitive policies and participatory planning that considers the concerns of all marginalised sections. The same critique applies to transport, climate policy, digital infrastructure, and even disaster management.

So, is public policy engendered enough? 🔗

The honest answer is: partly. The vocabulary has changed, the schemes have multiplied, and the data has improved. But the political will to challenge the structures that produce inequality – caste hierarchies, patrilineal property, gendered labour markets, and unequal household power – remains thin. The Towards Equality Report warned in 1974 that constitutional equality alone would not deliver social equality, and that warning is still relevant. Mahila Samakhya showed that change is possible when women are treated as agents rather than targets, but its premature closure showed how fragile that approach is in the face of bureaucratic preference for scale and visibility.

Engendering policy, then, is not a one-time act of including women. It is a continuous practice of asking who benefits, who is missed, and who decides – across every ministry, every budget, and every village.

What do you think? If you were redesigning a flagship welfare scheme in your district today, what would you change to make it genuinely gender-transformative rather than just gender-inclusive? And do you think a programme like Mahila Samakhya could survive in today’s policy environment, or has the moment for grassroots feminist policymaking passed?

References

1. https://feminisminindia.com/2023/09/13/gender-mainstreaming-in-politics-need-for-an-inclusive-and-sensitive-governance/
2. https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/library/resource/towards-equality-report-of-the-committee-on-the-status-of-women-in-india/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_Equality
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1449403505700631
5. https://www.academia.edu/17461498/WOMEN_AND_DEVELOPMENT_REVISITING_THE_TOWARDS_EQUALITY_REPORT
6. https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/social-identity/mahila-samakhya-women-s-education-through-empowerment
7. https://admin-policyhub-beta.educationaboveall.org/index.php/solution/mahila-samakhya-program
8. https://csr.education/gender-development/empowering-women-grassroots-inclusive-governance/
9. https://kafila.online/2015/11/21/educationists-and-womens-rights-activists-oppose-closure-of-mahila-samakhya/
10. https://www.epw.in/journal/2016/12/commentary/why-it-important-retain-independent-mahila-samakhya-programme.html
11. https://www.orfonline.org/research/engendering-indias-burgeoning-cities