History & Archaeology
The Script Nobody Can Read: Why the World’s Most Intriguing Ancient Mystery Remains Unsolved After so many Years
Over 4,000 inscriptions. More than a century of scholarship. AI, machine learning, a million-dollar prize, and an international conference with the Prime Minister and Home Minister in attendance. The Harappan script still has not been deciphered. Here is why — and why the question matters so much more than a history puzzle should.
Sometime around 2600 BCE, in a city of 40,000 people with flush toilets and standardised brick sizes, someone pressed a small soapstone seal into wet clay and made a mark. The seal was square, about 2.5 centimetres across, and it bore symbols — a row of signs above the image of a humped bull or a unicorn or a tiger seated before what might be an altar. The mark dried. The person who made it lived, worked, traded, and died. Their city was buried. Their civilisation faded. And the symbols on that seal, reproduced across thousands of similar objects from a Bronze Age urban culture that stretched across modern Pakistan and northwest India, waited.
They are still waiting.
The Harappan or Indus script — the writing system of the Indus Valley Civilisation, which thrived between roughly 3300 and 1300 BCE — is one of the last great undeciphered writing systems in the world. More than a century after Sir John Marshall announced the discovery of the civilisation to the world in 1924, and nearly 4,000 years after the last Harappan city fell silent, the symbols on those seals have not yielded their meaning to anyone.
In September 2025, more than 1,100 scholars, researchers, engineers, computer scientists, linguists, and students gathered in New Delhi for an international conference organised by the Union Ministry of Culture and the Archaeological Survey of India, dedicated entirely to the question of the script. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah attended — signalling that this is not merely an academic puzzle. The political significance of this undeciphered system of writing runs as deep as its cultural weight.
It has still not been cracked.
First: What Makes a Script Decipherable?
To understand why the Harappan script has resisted every attempt at decipherment, it helps to understand what made other ancient scripts eventually yield. Deciphering an unknown script is not one problem. It is a sequence of at least five problems that must be solved in order, with each step depending on the previous one.
The Five Steps to Decipherment
Step 1. Establish that the symbols actually constitute a writing system — not decorative marks or an inventory system.
Step 2. Identify and separate individual signs from the symbol stream — work out where one sign ends and another begins.
Step 3. Reduce the full set of observed symbols to a minimal core inventory by identifying allographs — variant forms of the same sign, the way printed “a” and cursive “a” are the same letter.
Step 4. Assign phonetic or semantic values to each sign.
Step 5. Match those values to a known or reconstructable language.
Source: Fabio Tamburini, ‘Decipherment of Lost Ancient Scripts as Combinatorial Optimisation,’ 2023
For the Harappan script, scholars are still arguing about Step 1.
The Three Reasons It Is So Hard
1. There Is No Rosetta Stone
The single most powerful tool in the history of decipherment is a multilingual inscription — the same text written in a known and an unknown script, side by side. The Rosetta Stone gave scholars a Greek text alongside Egyptian hieroglyphics and demotic script; Jean-François Champollion used it to crack hieroglyphics in 1822. The Behistun Inscription in Iran gave scholars a trilingual cuneiform text that unlocked ancient Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian writing in the early 19th century.
The Harappan civilisation had robust trade links with Mesopotamia — Indus seals and goods have been found in ancient Mesopotamian sites, and Mesopotamian records mention a land called “Meluhha” which most scholars identify as the Indus Valley. But despite decades of excavation, not a single bilingual inscription connecting the Harappan script to any known writing system has been found. The civilisation left no Rosetta Stone. Without one, every attempt at decipherment is essentially guesswork elevated by method.
2. An Unknown Script Writing an Unknown Language
Scholar Andrew Robinson, in his influential book Lost Languages (2008), divides undeciphered scripts into three categories: an unknown script writing a known language; a known script writing an unknown language; and an unknown script writing an unknown language. The Harappan script falls into the third — the hardest category, with the fewest reference points.
What Is Linguistic Decipherment? (Simply Explained)
Why “Reading” a Script Is Not the Same as “Understanding” It
Decipherment has two separate components that are often confused. The first is reading — working out the sound or phonetic value that each symbol represents. The second is understanding — working out what the language those sounds constitute actually means. A script can be read without being understood: scholars can accurately pronounce Linear B symbols (the script of Mycenaean Greek), but only because Michael Ventris recognised in 1952 that the underlying language was an archaic form of Greek — a language he already knew. If the Harappan language turns out to be a form of proto-Dravidian, or Sanskrit, or something entirely unrelated to any surviving language, the same symbols that can be read phonetically might remain semantically opaque for decades more.
3. The Inscriptions Are Extremely Short
Of the approximately 3,500 to 4,000 seals and inscribed objects that have been identified, the average inscription contains just five signs. The longest known Harappan inscription has 26 characters. This is not a lot to work with. Compare this to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, which covered entire temple walls, or Mesopotamian cuneiform, which filled clay tablets with economic records, astronomical observations, and literature including the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Harappan inscriptions — brief, contextually ambiguous, and mostly appearing on objects of uncertain purpose — provide the bare minimum of material for analytical work. Its symbols number over 400 but lack a bilingual key, making decipherment difficult. The script is brief and appears on commercial and ritual objects.
What We Know: The Key Facts About the Script
The Harappan Script — What Scholars Agree On
- Civilisation dates: approximately 3300–1300 BCE, at its urban peak around 2600–1900 BCE
- Geographic spread: over 800,000 sq km across modern Pakistan and northwest India — the world’s largest Bronze Age urban culture by area
- Number of inscribed objects found: approximately 3,500–4,000 seals plus pottery, tablets, and other artefacts
- Number of distinct signs: estimates range from 400 to 425 (Asko Parpola identified 425; S.R. Rao identified 62)
- Average inscription length: 5 signs
- Longest known inscription: 26 signs
- Writing direction: most likely right to left
- No bilingual inscription has ever been found
- The underlying language remains unknown
The Competing Theories:
The question of what language underlies the Harappan script is not merely academic. It is entangled with some of the most contested questions in South Asian history: where Sanskrit came from, whether the Aryan migration theory is correct, and who can claim the deepest roots in the Indian subcontinent. As one conference document put it, decipherment debates often reflect present-day cultural politics as much as ancient realities.
Theory 1: Sanskrit / Vedic [S.R. Rao]
The earliest notable Indian attempt was by archaeologist S.R. Rao, who in 1982 postulated that the script contained 62 signs and linked the Indus language to Sanskrit and the Vedic civilisation. As Andrew Robinson wrote, Rao seemed “determined to prove that the Indus language was the ancestor of Sanskrit, the root language of most modern languages of North India, and that Sanskrit was therefore not the product of Indo-Aryan invasions from the west via Central Asia but was instead the expression of indigenous Indian genius.”
At the September 2025 conference, some researchers went further, claiming the script contained Rig Vedic mantras and identifying references to the Puranas — texts that historians note were composed over a thousand years after the Harappan civilisation ended.
If Sanskrit were proven to be the underlying language, it would support the argument that the Vedic and Harappan civilisations were continuous — a claim with enormous implications for the Aryan migration debate and for the political case that Vedic culture is entirely indigenous to the subcontinent.
Theory 2: Proto-Dravidian [Asko Parpola]
The most developed and widely cited scholarly hypothesis is that the underlying language is a form of proto-Dravidian — an ancestor of the Dravidian language family that today includes Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. Its most prominent proponent is Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola, who has spent decades on the script and identified 425 distinct signs.
What Is the “Rebus Principle”?
How Pictograms Can Represent Sound, Not Meaning
The rebus principle is a writing technique in which a pictogram represents a word that sounds like the depicted object — not the object itself. The clearest modern example is the way a bee and a leaf might together represent “belief” — not because anyone is writing about bees and leaves, but because the sounds match. Ancient writing systems widely used this technique to extend a limited set of pictures into a system that could represent abstract words and grammatical elements.
Parpola used this principle to interpret the fish sign — one of the most common symbols on Indus seals. He argued it is unlikely to represent actual fish. In Dravidian languages, the word for fish (min or meen) is a homophone of the word for star. So the fish sign, in Parpola’s reading, represents “star” — and building on this, he claimed to have found the Old Tamil names of all planets written into the Indus inscriptions. This interpretation, while ingenious, requires acceptance of the Dravidian language hypothesis as a prior — which is exactly what remains disputed.
Support for the Dravidian hypothesis comes from an unexpected quarter: Brahui, a Dravidian language spoken today by roughly three million people in Balochistan, Pakistan — geographically at the heart of the Indus Valley Civilisation’s territory.
The existence of a Dravidian language in this region, isolated from the main Dravidian-speaking areas of south India, suggests that Dravidian languages may once have been far more widespread across the subcontinent. India’s leading Indus script researcher, the late Iravatham Mahadevan, supported the Dravidian hypothesis, as have several Western scholars.
Theory 3: Tribal and Austro-Asiatic Languages [Prakash N. Salame]
Scholars such as Prakash N. Salame claim up to 90 percent decipherment through Gondi, a proto-Dravidian language, while Prabhunath Hembrom explores Santali connections. Both proposals face scepticism due to methodological gaps. Others have linked the script to Ho, a language of the Jharkhand region. These claims, often made with passionate certainty, have not persuaded the mainstream of the field.
Theory 4: Not a Script At All [Steve Farmer]
The most disruptive hypothesis came in a 2004 paper by historian Steve Farmer, computer linguist Richard Sproat, and Indologist Michael Witzel. They argued that the Harappan symbols are not a script in any linguistic sense.
Their evidence: the inscriptions are too short to encode a language, there is too much repetition of the same short sequences, and the signs may function more like religious or political emblems — heraldic or ritual markers rather than phonetic notation.
Parpola and others criticised the paper sharply at the time. But its conclusions have since found additional support. Linguist Peggy Mohan, author of Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through Its Languages, told that the signs resemble a hallmarking system — like the personalised marks that dhobis in India still use today to identify their customers’ laundry.
“Even today dhobis in India have their own signs which are useful for them but they are not what you would call language,” she said.
A software engineer named Bahata Mukhopadhyay has suggested the script encoded rules for taxation and commerce, rather than spoken language — aligning with the Farmer-Sproat-Witzel view.
Enter the Machines: AI and the Million-Dollar Prize
In early 2025, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin announced a prize of one million dollars for anyone who could credibly decipher the Harappan script. The announcement was partly political — the Dravidian hypothesis, if confirmed, would provide enormous cultural validation for the Tamil-speaking south — but it also reflected the genuine global excitement around the possibility that AI-powered analysis might finally break the deadlock.
A March 2025 study using a hybrid CNN-Transformer model explored visual patterns in Harappan inscriptions and found symbol frequency and co-occurrence that align with known scripts, but the researchers concluded that further linguistic context is needed.
Computer scientist Rajesh PN Rao at the University of Washington has used statistical analysis to argue that the script shows the conditional entropy patterns characteristic of linguistic systems — consistent with it being a script — rather than the patterns of non-linguistic symbol systems. His work counters the Farmer-Sproat-Witzel hypothesis, though it does not identify the language.
India has also turned to young entrepreneurs in AI and machine learning, with a pan-India competition identifying 40 participants and 10 researchers to contribute to decipherment efforts — part of the broader “Gyan Bharatam Mission” announced at the September 2025 conference to preserve and study manuscript heritage.
The difficulty is that AI tools are powerful at pattern recognition but are still dependent on the same fundamental limitation: without an anchor — a known language, a bilingual text, a confirmed phonetic value for even one sign — there is no way to validate any reading.
A machine that finds statistical patterns in the Harappan corpus can tell you which signs cluster together, which sequences are most common, and how the entropy of the sign distribution compares to known languages. It cannot tell you what the signs mean.
Why It Matters Beyond History
The stakes of decipherment go far beyond academic curiosity. If the Harappan script is ever genuinely cracked, it would answer questions that lie at the heart of India’s self-understanding as a civilisation.
Was the language Sanskrit? Then the Vedic and Harappan traditions were not separate civilisations but continuous ones, and Sanskrit is indigenous to the subcontinent in a way that the Indo-Aryan migration theory denies.
Was it proto-Dravidian? Then the Harappan people were the ancestors of south India’s linguistic communities, and the narrative of Dravidian culture being peripheral to “mainstream” Indian civilisation is historically backwards.
Was it something else entirely — a language unrelated to anything that survived — or was it not a language at all, but a system of marks? Then the Harappan civilisation, the world’s largest Bronze Age urban culture, is in some sense permanently opaque: we can see its cities and measure its drainage systems, but we cannot read its mind.
That is the condition we are currently in. A century of scholarship, four thousand seals, 400-odd symbols, AI models, international conferences attended by prime ministers, a million-dollar prize, and still — silence.
The seal is still waiting.
Source: Indian Express
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.
On March 31, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its annual Gender Gap Report 2021. The Global Gender Gap report is an annual report released by the WEF. The gender gap is the difference between women and men as reflected in social, political, intellectual, cultural, or economic attainments or attitudes. The gap between men and women across health, education, politics, and economics widened for the first time since records began in 2006.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]No need to remember all the data, only pick out few important ones to use in your answers.
The Global gender gap index aims to measure this gap in four key areas : health, education, economics, and politics. It surveys economies to measure gender disparity by collating and analyzing data that fall under four indices : economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
The 2021 Global Gender Gap Index benchmarks 156 countries on their progress towards gender parity. The index aims to serve as a compass to track progress on relative gaps between women and men in health, education, economy, and politics.
Although no country has achieved full gender parity, the top two countries (Iceland and Finland) have closed at least 85% of their gap, and the remaining seven countries (Lithuania, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Rwanda, and Ireland) have closed at least 80% of their gap. Geographically, the global top 10 continues to be dominated by Nordic countries, with —Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—in the top five.
The top 10 is completed by one country from Asia Pacific (New Zealand 4th), two Sub-Saharan countries (Namibia, 6th and Rwanda, 7th, one country from Eastern Europe (the new entrant to the top 10, Lithuania, 8th), and another two Western European countries (Ireland, 9th, and Switzerland, 10th, another country in the top-10 for the first time).There is a relatively equitable distribution of available income, resources, and opportunities for men and women in these countries. The tremendous gender gaps are identified primarily in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
Here, we can discuss the overall global gender gap scores across the index’s four main components : Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.
The indicators of the four main components are
(1) Economic Participation and Opportunity:
o Labour force participation rate,
o wage equality for similar work,
o estimated earned income,
o Legislators, senior officials, and managers,
o Professional and technical workers.
(2) Educational Attainment:
o Literacy rate (%)
o Enrollment in primary education (%)
o Enrollment in secondary education (%)
o Enrollment in tertiary education (%).
(3) Health and Survival:
o Sex ratio at birth (%)
o Healthy life expectancy (years).
(4) Political Empowerment:
o Women in Parliament (%)
o Women in Ministerial positions (%)
o Years with a female head of State (last 50 years)
o The share of tenure years.
The objective is to shed light on which factors are driving the overall average decline in the global gender gap score. The analysis results show that this year’s decline is mainly caused by a reversal in performance on the Political Empowerment gap.
Global Trends and Outcomes:
– Globally, this year, i.e., 2021, the average distance completed to gender parity gap is 68% (This means that the remaining gender gap to close stands at 32%) a step back compared to 2020 (-0.6 percentage points). These figures are mainly driven by a decline in the performance of large countries. On its current trajectory, it will now take 135.6 years to close the gender gap worldwide.
– The gender gap in Political Empowerment remains the largest of the four gaps tracked, with only 22% closed to date, having further widened since the 2020 edition of the report by 2.4 percentage points. Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 Parliament seats and 22.6% of over 3,400 Ministers worldwide. In 81 countries, there has never been a woman head of State as of January 15, 2021. At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.
– The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity remains the second-largest of the four key gaps tracked by the index. According to this year’s index results, 58% of this gap has been closed so far. The gap has seen marginal improvement since the 2020 edition of the report, and as a result, we estimate that it will take another 267.6 years to close.
– Gender gaps in Educational Attainment and Health and Survival are nearly closed. In Educational Attainment, 95% of this gender gap has been closed globally, with 37 countries already attaining gender parity. However, the ‘last mile’ of progress is proceeding slowly. The index estimates that it will take another 14.2 years to close this gap on its current trajectory completely.
In Health and Survival, 96% of this gender gap has been closed, registering a marginal decline since last year (not due to COVID-19), and the time to close this gap remains undefined. For both education and health, while progress is higher than economy and politics in the global data, there are important future implications of disruptions due to the pandemic and continued variations in quality across income, geography, race, and ethnicity.
India-Specific Findings:
India had slipped 28 spots to rank 140 out of the 156 countries covered. The pandemic causing a disproportionate impact on women jeopardizes rolling back the little progress made in the last decades-forcing more women to drop off the workforce and leaving them vulnerable to domestic violence.
India’s poor performance on the Global Gender Gap report card hints at a serious wake-up call and learning lessons from the Nordic region for the Government and policy makers.
Within the 156 countries covered, women hold only 26 percent of Parliamentary seats and 22 percent of Ministerial positions. India, in some ways, reflects this widening gap, where the number of Ministers declined from 23.1 percent in 2019 to 9.1 percent in 2021. The number of women in Parliament stands low at 14.4 percent. In India, the gender gap has widened to 62.5 %, down from 66.8% the previous year.
It is mainly due to women’s inadequate representation in politics, technical and leadership roles, a decrease in women’s labor force participation rate, poor healthcare, lagging female to male literacy ratio, and income inequality.
The gap is the widest on the political empowerment dimension, with economic participation and opportunity being next in line. However, the gap on educational attainment and health and survival has been practically bridged.
India is the third-worst performer among South Asian countries, with Pakistan and Afghanistan trailing and Bangladesh being at the top. The report states that the country fared the worst in political empowerment, regressing from 23.9% to 9.1%.
Its ranking on the health and survival dimension is among the five worst performers. The economic participation and opportunity gap saw a decline of 3% compared to 2020, while India’s educational attainment front is in the 114th position.
India has deteriorated to 51st place from 18th place in 2020 on political empowerment. Still, it has slipped to 155th position from 150th position in 2020 on health and survival, 151st place in economic participation and opportunity from 149th place, and 114th place for educational attainment from 112th.
In 2020 reports, among the 153 countries studied, India is the only country where the economic gender gap of 64.6% is larger than the political gender gap of 58.9%. In 2021 report, among the 156 countries, the economic gender gap of India is 67.4%, 3.8% gender gap in education, 6.3% gap in health and survival, and 72.4% gender gap in political empowerment. In health and survival, the gender gap of the sex ratio at birth is above 9.1%, and healthy life expectancy is almost the same.
Discrimination against women has also been reflected in Health and Survival subindex statistics. With 93.7% of this gap closed to date, India ranks among the bottom five countries in this subindex. The wide sex ratio at birth gaps is due to the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices. Besides, more than one in four women has faced intimate violence in her lifetime.The gender gap in the literacy rate is above 20.1%.
Yet, gender gaps persist in literacy : one-third of women are illiterate (34.2%) than 17.6% of men. In political empowerment, globally, women in Parliament is at 128th position and gender gap of 83.2%, and 90% gap in a Ministerial position. The gap in wages equality for similar work is above 51.8%. On health and survival, four large countries Pakistan, India, Vietnam, and China, fare poorly, with millions of women there not getting the same access to health as men.
The pandemic has only slowed down in its tracks the progress India was making towards achieving gender parity. The country urgently needs to focus on “health and survival,” which points towards a skewed sex ratio because of the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices and women’s economic participation. Women’s labour force participation rate and the share of women in technical roles declined in 2020, reducing the estimated earned income of women, one-fifth of men.
Learning from the Nordic region, noteworthy participation of women in politics, institutions, and public life is the catalyst for transformational change. Women need to be equal participants in the labour force to pioneer the societal changes the world needs in this integral period of transition.
Every effort must be directed towards achieving gender parallelism by facilitating women in leadership and decision-making positions. Social protection programmes should be gender-responsive and account for the differential needs of women and girls. Research and scientific literature also provide unequivocal evidence that countries led by women are dealing with the pandemic more effectively than many others.
Gendered inequality, thereby, is a global concern. India should focus on targeted policies and earmarked public and private investments in care and equalized access. Women are not ready to wait for another century for equality. It’s time India accelerates its efforts and fight for an inclusive, equal, global recovery.
India will not fully develop unless both women and men are equally supported to reach their full potential. There are risks, violations, and vulnerabilities women face just because they are women. Most of these risks are directly linked to women’s economic, political, social, and cultural disadvantages in their daily lives. It becomes acute during crises and disasters.
With the prevalence of gender discrimination, and social norms and practices, women become exposed to the possibility of child marriage, teenage pregnancy, child domestic work, poor education and health, sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence. Many of these manifestations will not change unless women are valued more.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]2021 WEF Global Gender Gap report, which confirmed its 2016 finding of a decline in worldwide progress towards gender parity.
Over 2.8 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. As many as 104 countries still have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs, 59 countries have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace, and it is astonishing that a handful of countries still allow husbands to legally stop their wives from working.
Globally, women’s participation in the labour force is estimated at 63% (as against 94% of men who participate), but India’s is at a dismal 25% or so currently. Most women are in informal and vulnerable employment—domestic help, agriculture, etc—and are always paid less than men.
Recent reports from Assam suggest that women workers in plantations are paid much less than men and never promoted to supervisory roles. The gender wage gap is about 24% globally, and women have lost far more jobs than men during lockdowns.
The problem of gender disparity is compounded by hurdles put up by governments, society and businesses: unequal access to social security schemes, banking services, education, digital services and so on, even as a glass ceiling has kept leadership roles out of women’s reach.
Yes, many governments and businesses had been working on parity before the pandemic struck. But the global gender gap, defined by differences reflected in the social, political, intellectual, cultural and economic attainments or attitudes of men and women, will not narrow in the near future without all major stakeholders working together on a clear agenda—that of economic growth by inclusion.
The WEF report estimates 135 years to close the gap at our current rate of progress based on four pillars: educational attainment, health, economic participation and political empowerment.
India has slipped from rank 112 to 140 in a single year, confirming how hard women were hit by the pandemic. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two Asian countries that fared worse.
Here are a few things we must do:
One, frame policies for equal-opportunity employment. Use technology and artificial intelligence to eliminate biases of gender, caste, etc, and select candidates at all levels on merit. Numerous surveys indicate that women in general have a better chance of landing jobs if their gender is not known to recruiters.
Two, foster a culture of gender sensitivity. Take a review of current policies and move from gender-neutral to gender-sensitive. Encourage and insist on diversity and inclusion at all levels, and promote more women internally to leadership roles. Demolish silos to let women grab potential opportunities in hitherto male-dominant roles. Work-from-home has taught us how efficiently women can manage flex-timings and productivity.
Three, deploy corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds for the education and skilling of women and girls at the bottom of the pyramid. CSR allocations to toilet building, the PM-Cares fund and firms’ own trusts could be re-channelled for this.
Four, get more women into research and development (R&D) roles. A study of over 4,000 companies found that more women in R&D jobs resulted in radical innovation. It appears women score far higher than men in championing change. If you seek growth from affordable products and services for low-income groups, women often have the best ideas.
Five, break barriers to allow progress. Cultural and structural issues must be fixed. Unconscious biases and discrimination are rampant even in highly-esteemed organizations. Establish fair and transparent human resource policies.
Six, get involved in local communities to engage them. As Michael Porter said, it is not possible for businesses to sustain long-term shareholder value without ensuring the welfare of the communities they exist in. It is in the best interest of enterprises to engage with local communities to understand and work towards lowering cultural and other barriers in society. It will also help connect with potential customers, employees and special interest groups driving the gender-equity agenda and achieve better diversity.