Women and men in India 1996-1997

Gender discrimination and gender inequities, embedded in the psyche of populations across the globe, has started attracting serious attention of policy makers in several countries. Over the last few decades, there has come about a great awareness, particularly in the developed countries including India, of the face that gender discriminatory practices are neither conducive to the development process nor to the stature of women. One of the more important dimensions of the problem relates to the significant amount of women's contribution to the national economy, which remains invisible and, therefore, needs quantification.

It has been the endeavour of the Central Statistical Organisation, (CSO) to initiate measures for making available the most up-to-date and reliable data on various socio-economic concerns including gender issues. With this aim in view, CSO implemented a project on Improvement of Statistics on Gender Issues during 1994-95. Under this project, two interactive workshops of data users and producers were organised to identify gender issues specific to India, data needs to monitor them and existing data gaps. As a follow up of the recommendations of these workshops, a publication "Women and Men in India, 1995" giving time series data on a large number of indicators was brought out. This publication was well received by the policy makers, planners, researchers and academicians. Keeping in view the utility of the publication, it was considered desirable to bring out this publication every year. As the publication of 1996 issues was slightly delayed, efforts have now been made to bring out a combined issue for 1996 and 1997 giving most recent available data on various indicators. Efforts have been also made to improve the presentation of the data by including some additional coloured graphs and charts.