Laavanya Tewari

In this episode, Laavanya Tewari (Editor, LSPR) sits down with Sunaina Kumar to discuss a host of issues on Gender and Development. In this podcast, we cover the PMJDY (Prime Minister Jan Dhan Yojana) and women’s access to digital financial services, the Female Labor Force Participation Rate, and the potential socio-political implications of reserving 33% of seats for women in Parliament and state legislatures—and policies to ensure issues such as proxy representation, patriarchal interference, and limited decision-making power do not resurface at higher levels of governance. Sunaina Kumar has been a celebrated journalist for over 15 years and has reported on various critical political and social issues of much contemporary relevance such as the migration crisis in Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar, Uyghurs living in exile in India, the developments in Kashmir, the agrarian crisis in Punjab. She is currently a Senior Fellow at ORF, an Executive Director at Think20 India Secretariat and a Maitri fellow. At ORF, she works with the Centre for New Economic Diplomacy and focuses on gender. Through her work, she brings attention to marginalized voices and writes about human rights, gender, development, governance and various policy initiatives.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

Laavanya: Good morning, everyone. On behalf of the Law School Policy Review, it is my immense pleasure to welcome you all to today’s podcast on gender and development with Sunaina Kumar. We are honoured to have with us the brilliant and celebrated journalist, as well as a senior fellow at the ORF, Miss Sunaina Kumar, whose stellar body of work over the past 15 years has brought to light pressing issues of human rights, governance, gender and development. Miss Kumar’s ability to weave eloquent storytelling with evidence-based insights has not only raised awareness about marginalized voices, but has also informed meaningful discourse on critical social, political, and policy changes. Her perspective today promises to be just as enriching and thought-provoking. I extend a very warm welcome to Miss Sunaina Kumar, as well as our audience today who will be joining us. So, without further ado, please join me in welcoming Miss Sunaina Kumar. Sunaina, would you like to say anything?

Sunaina: Laavanya, thank you so much, first for inviting me to this podcast. I’m really excited to be a part of this and also to engage with your audience, which I think is really critical. Young people engaging with policy, law, and legislation, all of that is really great. And congratulations to you on your debut of a podcast. I’m excited to do this, and thanks for the very kind introduction, that was really very generous. But I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Laavanya: So, Sunaina, I was actually wondering, in our previous exchange, you told me that you had shifted place from Sydney back to Delhi recently after the completion of the highly prestigious Maitri fellowship. So, I just wanted to ask you how, how was the whole experience?

Sunaina: Well, thanks for beginning with that. It was actually a really great experience. I think all secondments can be very enriching and really great learning experiences when you work outside of what is your familiar zone. So essentially, this was a fellowship by the Australian Government, and the idea of the fellowship is to encourage people who work in public policy in India and Australia to better understand each other, to deepen the exchange of ideas between the two countries in the policy sphere. And the idea would be that by the end of six months, I would be more familiar with the policy environment in Australia and through my work, I would ensure that people and places that I interact with in Australia, in the policy government think tank scene, have a better understanding of India. And that’s always a great thing. Australia is one of the closest bilateral partners of India. The two countries have been increasingly growing closer as partners in the Indo-Pacific, as members of the Quad. But I think relationships between countries grow through people-to-people ties. And that’s also how India-U.S. ties are where they are, through the exchange of people. So a program like this can be very impactful in pushing the bilateral between countries.

Laavanya: Right. That’s actually really interesting to hear about. And I mean, it’s just great that you also had a great time during your prestigious fellowship. Sunaina, in your extensive work over the years, is there any one project or any campaign that stands out, being the closest to your heart, something that inspired you to do what you do today, and why does it hold that special place?

Sunaina: Well, that’s a slightly hard question to answer, Laavanya, I was thinking about this. You know, when we look back, there are so many things that we’ve liked doing. But I think what stands out, and your question made me think about this, is perhaps the projects that are that are harder to do, you know, that take a lot out of you, that’s where the learnings come from. So maybe I’ll pick one from my previous life as a journalist and one as a public policy professional. As a journalist, I think one of the hardest projects I’ve taken on was reporting from Bangladesh in Cox’s Bazar on the Rohingya issue. Physically, mentally, I think in every way possible, it was a hard thing to do. You know, from something like getting to the Rohingya refugee camps, which is a very complicated thing. You drive every day for two hours through very narrow roads, through land that was actually a forest reserve that was never meant to host as many people as have landed there. And you reach there, in the middle of a forest which is now really a township with tents and the people there are living in the most grinding conditions and also trapped. They’ve left their homes. They’ve left everything behind, their belongings, their family members, sometimes with no way of going back home, nor any way of building their lives, living off aid that NGOs from all over the world are providing. They can’t work, they can’t study, they can’t change their lives, mostly. I think that’s hard to witness, but also that when you find people in such places who just bring so much grit and determination from those communities to change things around them, I think that’s inspiring to see. And I think as a policy professional, definitely working on G20 under the Indian presidency. At the Observer Research Foundation where I work, we were the Think20 Secretariat, and working on that at a time which I think was very pivotal for India to make a statement in the world as a rising power, as a leader of the Global South, to also make foreign policy accessible to everyone in India to have worked on that and observed it firsthand was a privilege. It was a year of working on a drill until we reached the finish line, but it was also very exciting.

Laavanya: That actually sounds extremely interesting, like you had quite an interesting life, and it’s also very inspiring. Like, it takes a lot of grit and determination to do what you did. And that’s really great. So, Sunaina, you talked about it as well just now about your role in the G20. So you were a part of the Secretariat of the Think20, if I’m not wrong. Considering your experience as the executive director for Think20 India, how do you envision India’s role in the G20 contributing to the long-term Rise of the Global South, particularly in shaping multilateral governance structures like BRICS and G20 to better prioritize gender equity and inclusion of women in leadership economic development as well as policy making?

Sunaina: That’s quite an interesting question, Laavanya. I would say that I think India found a way, as most countries do, to use the G20 platform to promote its own domestic priorities. At a time when the world’s attention is focused on a country under the G20 presidency, India used that to talk about issues that are important for our own development, whether it was the climate crisis or digitization, and financing for SDGs. One of those priorities, of course, is gender equality. We don’t do well at all on gender equality in India, as we all know. Across parameters: economic participation, political participation, safety and security of women, all of those are issues of concern. And since G20 is an economic forum, India used that to focus on the economic participation of women through the theme of women led development, which is positioned as a unique idea, in a way, where India talked about women’s leadership and women as agents of change, as very necessary voices at the core of India’s development journey. And I think it became one of the few countries to pick the idea of women and leadership and gender equality as core priority in the G20 and I think what it did was put a spotlight on what is a very important issue. The challenge, of course, is to ensure that we keep working on it and building on it further.

Laavanya: Okay, that makes sense. Also, how was your experience on the Secretariat of the Think20? How long did it go on for? How long did it take for the whole preparations? And how was it when it finally happened? How did you feel?

Sunaina: So we were a team of just 30 people in our organization who were working on it full-time, but I’m pretty sure that we would have worked with hundreds of people across G20 countries by the time we concluded all of this because we were working with research institutions, academics, thinkers, policy makers in all the G20 countries. We were working on bringing out research on policy recommendations to share with the governments, and that was like a juggernaut, actually. You kind of put all of this together. The Juggernaut rolls for a year, and you do what you can with it, and then it all gets dismantled. And it’s actually a very, very interesting thing to do.

Laavanya: I can only imagine, because for us it’s news. It was in the news for a week. And I remember preparing for GK, and I used to read about the G20, and all of this. But sometimes we fail to account for how much effort and how much hard work went behind the scenes. So that’s great, actually. And for my next question, Sunaina, I want to ask about the PM Jan Dhan Yojna, that you also talk about in one of your articles. So these accounts have reportedly improved financial access for women, yet access and digital literacy remain challenges. Additionally, the low ownership of smartphones and limited digital literacy among women representatives exacerbated the challenges faced by elected women representatives in conducting administrative functions in Panchayats. And you talk about that in your article as well, which was published on ORF. So my question regarding that was what steps, according to you, should be taken to bridge the gap between access to digital financial services and their effective usage, particularly for women in rural areas, to ensure both political participation as well as their economic empowerment?

Sunaina: I think that’s a very relevant question, especially when we talk so much about Digital India. All our lives have been changed by the digitization that we have seen take place in this country over the last few years. I think before we talk about how this gap can be addressed, it’s important to really understand what we’re dealing with, which I think in our very digitized urban lives, in Delhi or in Bangalore, we can lose sight of or sometimes even be unaware of the extent of. And I work on digital financial inclusion. Even then, when I go on the field, sometimes I get surprised by just seeing this take place, the exclusion of women, so to speak. Just this year before the election, I had travelled to parts of Western Uttar Pradesh, and I was meeting with female voters who were uneducated, unmarried, and not working, trying to understand their voting choices. Many of these women were not allowed to have phones by the elders of their families, for the very basic reason that the families fear that once these young women have phones, they will lose control of these women. And that is the reason why this happens to so many young women, in rural India, especially. And what is the impact of this? These are people, young women, who have a lot to contribute to the country, who cannot get access to a phone. It’s the same with married women, who are also controlled like this. This is the social norms part of it. There are also economic reasons in rural families. Often because of unaffordability, women will be the last ones to be able to buy a phone because it’s not prioritized. So the digital gender gap is a phenomena that’s taken root, and not without any context. It’s reflecting gender biases that we see women face in real life as well. And I think it’s important to understand the impact of it. How does it affect women? First of all, it’s keeping women away from a revolution which is taking place in the country, which is the digital revolution. It’s taking away opportunities from women to improve their lives. And it’s also taking away the opportunity from this country, where many women cannot contribute to our economy, to our social progress, because they cannot access something as basic as this. And I think the last part of it was, as you said, how can we address it? I think there are many ways: policy makers, NGOs, state actors, they can ensure that there is better access to phones, but that’s only half the job. I think what also needs to be worked on at the community and family level is to shift norms, which is not easy to do, but we have to keep at it.

Laavanya: That makes a lot of sense. For my next question, I would like to talk about the glass ceiling that the phenomenon that a lot of women talk about in urban areas. I looked at the female labour force participation rate. It jumped to 37% in 2023 which was a great jump from the previous year’s 32.8%. However, India’s labour force participation rate for women, while it has increased in leaps and bounds, remains one of the lowest globally, even as industries such as technology and banking report increasing representation. So what do you think? What are the key structural barriers that prevent a broader inclusion of women in the workforce, and how do you think company policies or even government policies can address these gaps?

Sunaina: That’s a very big question. I’m going to try and break this down. I think it’s a question that puzzles policy makers, practitioners, and observers, in India and around the world, because it’s a question that is framed within a contradiction, and which is that we have increasing literacy of women in the country, we have increased organization, and we have a growing economy. And despite all of this, we are not able to either bring more women to the workforce or retain the women who are in the workforce. Just before this, we were talking about social norms while talking about the digital literacy, the digital gender gap. And I think that’s a good starting point to understand why this is happening. The first reason for this would be the fact that women, Indian women, have the highest burden of care work in the world. And this is backed by data. Indian women do more than eight times the work at home than men, and that time is spent in childcare, in elder care, on domestic tasks. There is the issue of time poverty that women in India face. And I’ve worked on this with other researchers, we also looked at figures within G20 countries for a comparison, and it was very stark. Women in South Africa work 2.3 times more than men. In China, they work 2.5 times more. Women universally work more than men, that’s a global trend, but 8.4 times is untenable, and it’s what we have in India. That’s one factor, other factors that we have are women’s mobility, which is related directly to women’s safety. Women are not able to access higher educational institutes, or even vocational learning and skill training, which can be located further away from their homes. But even if they are able to access it, there is not enough freedom for them, which is very much a question of safety, mobility, and providing public transport so that women can leave home. This is an issue we see in news headlines, we see this in data. There are more demand and supply issues. We need to also have more gender sensitive policies at all levels, whether it is private sector or government sector. If we look at women who do work in India, they are concentrated in the informal workforce, either working as unpaid workers in family enterprises, on farms and agricultural land, running their own enterprises from home, underpaid and with no social protection. So they are working despite the odds. And I think that’s important to understand. And there is role for policy making in this. There is a lot that the state can do, and all actors together can do in this. Building an ecosystem where care work is not the sole responsibility of women, where there are institutions for childcare, places for elder care, and also ensuring that those who do work in care, which is primarily women, are paid well for that work. We need to also deal with public safety, create safe public transport, so that women can leave their homes and go to work. We need to ensure that women have access to skill-building platforms, to technology, and to the rapidly changing demands of the labour market, which is just adopting technology at such a high rate that we have to ensure that women are not left out of that too.

Laavanya: I am actually so glad that we are at a point where we can actually put figures to what we’ve always seen around ourselves. I’ve always seen the women in my house taking up the larger chunk of the household work, and I just normalized it in my head. But now that I’m actually realizing how difficult this makes it for women. It’s so unfair, the burden is very unfair. And now that we can put figures to it, I’m realizing how badly we’re doing and that we really need to do something and bring in really important policy changes. It reminds me of this quote by my favourite feminist author, Caroline Perez. She said, “There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work.” And I think your whole answer encapsulates the very essence of what she was trying to say.

Sunaina: I think we can all write that down on T shirts, that is so true. And I think also what you said about the availability of data, that is so important, as you said, it is something that all of us make invisible, normalise in our homes, in our communities and our families. But it’s not like there isn’t awareness. There is work being done on that. The Indian government itself has brought out a Time Use Survey so that the data that we have on the work that Indian women are doing and how it’s so much higher than men, is based on the fact that the government has done time use surveys to understand how Indian women are spending their time, and the fact that we have this is a great thing. Many countries of the global south may not have this data, and that gives us the starting base, backed by evidence, to actually create interventions around this.

Laavanya: Sunaina, in the previous conversation that we were having, we also talked about women and their role in Panchayats, basically women representatives. Currently, there’s this whole chatter around the reservation of 33% of seats for women in the Parliament. I wanted to talk about that as well. What do you think are the potential socio-political implications of that? Could the challenges faced by the women representatives in panchayats, such as proxy representation, patriarchal interference and their limited decision making, do you think all of that could resurface at higher levels of governance as well? And again, what do you think we could do to prevent that from happening in the first place, to ensure some substantive political empowerment for women?

Sunaina: I think especially now with the bill that was adopted to bring in gender quotas in state legislatures and the parliament, there are a few things that we ourselves can look at and learn from and now would be a very important time to do it, as we start implementing these reforms. I think first, the most important thing to say is that quotas work, despite the questions and the criticism around them, which are sometimes very valid. We’ve had the phenomena of proxy candidates or men using the gender quotas and planting women while they remain in power. The thing is that gender quotas work over a period of time, and that is something that we know globally, from other countries, but we also know from our own experience. We’ve had quotas for women in local levels of government for 30 years. And 30 years is quite a long time for a policy to be in place, and for us to see the effects of it, to understand what has worked and what has not worked. I think that’s something that we have managed to do, and I think that there are essential learnings from it. We do know that it’s very important to have women in political leadership. It is important for democracy. When women are in politics, we do see improved outcomes and developments in politics, but there are so many challenges that they that they face. Women are not able to find financing for running elections. They’re not able to get enough political exposure, they’re not able to get training and capacity building to understand issues of governance. They face patriarchal norms and gender biases, so that political parties themselves are not able to, or do not, back women candidates. All those beliefs are very strongly entrenched. And yet, despite all this, when the quotas were brought in, it was a good time to look back on what we have achieved through reservations in Panchayats. With my colleagues, I have done some research over this past year to understand how women’s reservation in municipal corporations and Panchayats have worked also. What has been the impact of it? There has been a lot of positive impact in having women in these seats backed by quotas. What can we do to ensure a more level playing field? We have to ensure that women have access to political networks so that they can fundraise. We need training programs, capacity building programs, reforms at party levels so that political parties can work with women. And we need to bring in NGOs, the private sector, and governments so that women representatives can build and sustain political networks. These are the things that men are able to do much more easily than women candidates. And I think that this has worked where it has been implemented. It’s worked at the local level, and it would also work, in Parliament and in state legislatures.

Laavanya: Thank you so much for agreeing to record this, Sunaina. We were really delighted to have you, thank you very much for this. We got to know a lot today, we talked about your Maitri fellowship, and we got to know about the background of G20 the Think20 secretariat that you were a part of. We got to know about, and you coined this term, the digital gender gap, which I found really interesting. We talked about women in governance from rural areas to the upcoming 33% reservation in state legislature. I think we’ve covered a lot of bases today, and I think you shared a lot of insights that I will be going back and reflecting on as a law student. I think this is something we miss out on, a lot of the time we look at the black letter, but we forget that there’s actual, real people who are being affected by it. And I think this has really given me a lot to think about, and I think it will help me make a more well-rounded judgement of who all of this is affecting on the ground level, and judge policies that way, rather than just what is the efficient and utilitarian way of thinking.

Sunaina: Thank you, Laavanya. Your questions were actually very insightful and also got me thinking about a lot of things. And as you said, I think it’s important for all of us, including your community of people who work in law, to work this and to understand policy making better. I’m really glad that you’ve taken up this initiative.

Laavanya: Thank you so much, Sunaina.