Picture: V. Sudershan
President Pranab Mukherjee presents the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Growth to Ela Ramesh Bhatt, watched by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, chairperson, Indira Gandhi Memorial Belief, at Rashtrapati Bhavan, in New Delhi on Monday.
Gender disparity within the nation may be tackled solely by way of proactive intervention in areas comparable to financial empowerment of girls, constructing of satisfactory social and bodily infrastructure and enhancing girls’s position in governance, stated President Pranab Mukherjee on Monday.
Presenting the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Growth for 2011 to Ela Ramesh Bhatt of Self Employed Girls’s Affiliation (SEWA) at Rashtrapati Bhavan right here, Mr. Mukherjee stated empowerment of girls was the important thing to not solely assembly the target of gender equality but additionally to eliciting full participation in nation-building.
Congratulating Ms. Ela Bhatt, the President stated her life and work was reflective of the philosophy and beliefs espoused by the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The prize bestowed upon Ms. Bhatt “is a tribute to her unflinching zeal in direction of the betterment of girls in society and progress of humanity”.
Expressing hope that Ms. Bhatt’s instance would spur many extra initiatives within the nation and elsewhere, the President stated there was a must strengthen the techniques and processes that facilitated girls to take management and declare possession of their lives.
“Rural backwardness may be addressed solely by way of concerted efforts to create equality in entry and unearth the potentialities hidden in individuals. Ms. Bhatt’s work has underscored this strategy to socio-economic upliftment,” he stated. “Girls comprise 48.5 per cent of our whole inhabitants. Although the general intercourse ratio has elevated by 7 factors throughout the decade 2001 to 2011, the ratio of 940 females per 1,000 male inhabitants in 2011 is [a] disappointing determine and displays the space that is still in attaining true equality.”
The President stated that as poor girls have been typically incapacitated to behave individually, social mobilisation for his or her financial redemption was a important necessity. “Participatory establishment constructing by way of self-help teams has been discovered to be one of the efficient instruments for the empowerment of girls in creating international locations. As on thirty first March 2012, there have been round 63 lakh all-women self-help teams in India that had mixed financial institution financial savings of greater than Rs. 5,100 crore. The variety of such self-help teams is growing, with a development fee of 9.2, 14.8 and three.3 per cent throughout 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12 respectively,” he identified.
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