A country headed by a woman President and powerful women as chief ministers in four influential states should have been safest place in the world for women.
On the contrary, India is the fourth most dangerous place in the world for women. A Thomson Reuters Foundation global poll reveals this shocking fact. It's an unflattering irony for a country where women make it to the top political positions - President Pratibha Patil, Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, chief ministers Mayawati of Uttar Pradesh, Sheila Dikshit of Delhi, J. Jayalalithaa of Tamil Nadu and Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal, ruling Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj. Yet there are women deprived of their basic right to be born.
The report says the country is worse than war-torn Somalia because of high instances of female foeticide, infanticide and human trafficking.
It is only a little better than war-ravaged Afghanistan and Congo. The African nation is saddled with the ignominious title of "rape capital of the world".
India can, like it always does, take pride in the fact that it is a notch below its arch-rival Pakistan on the shame list. South Asia, as can be deduced from the poll, is the most dangerous region for women.
Evidently, India's apparent economic progress finds no reflection in the status of its girl child - most of whom are even denied the right to be born.
"This survey shows that hidden dangers like lack of education or terrible access to healthcare are as deadly, if not more so, than physical dangers like rape and murder which usually grab the headlines. In the top five countries, basic human rights are systematically denied to women," Monique Villa, chief executive of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, said.
The poll conducted among 213 gender experts who ranked countries on their overall perception of danger, as well as by six key categories of risks - health, sexual violence, nonsexual violence, harmful practices rooted in culture, tradition or religion, lack of access to economic resources and human trafficking.
The Thomson Reuters Foundation explained why it ranked India so low on the list. The main reasons were female foeticide, infanticide and human trafficking.
In fact, it quotes the government's own horrific statistics on trafficking. A CBI report in 2009 says 90 per cent of trafficking took place within the country and there were some three million prostitutes, of whom about 40 per cent were children.
Criticising the government's response to prevent trafficking of women, who invariably end up in decrepit brothels, Cristi Hegranes of the Global Press Institute said: "The practice is common but lucrative so it goes untouched by government and the police."
The report goes onto quote the US state department's 2010 dossier on trafficking, which cites sex slavery, forced labour and forced marriage as crime against women taking place unabated in India and the other countries mentioned on the list. Worst of all, traffickers hardly get caught and punished in India.
The Thomson Reuters Foundation highlights the plight of missing girls in India, citing the UN Population Fund report. It says up to 50 million girls have gone "missing" over the past century because of female infanticide and foeticide.
Human Rights Watch's South Asia director Meenakshi Ganguly more or less agreed with the report. "It is true that South Asians don't, in general, value their daughters. This for instance is apparent in the dwindling gender ratio in India. Domestic violence is rampant and various forms of sexual assault often remain an untold horror that women endure," she said.
Domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, incest, acid attacks and dowry deaths, gender experts say, are just the tip of the iceberg.
Women continue to have little say over their lives. They have practically no access to finances, land, inheritance rights, education, employment, justice, healthcare and nutrition.
Mona Mehta, leader of Oxfam's We Can campaign against violence against women in South Asia, said: "It's not enough to have a law. The implementation needs to be resourced well enough for it to work."
