Abstract: Federal governance structures across the world need to be engendered. Gender equality should ideally operate at all levels of decentralised decision-making. India, working on the principles of mixing competition and cooperation in federalism and bringing in gender equality too. Women in India participate in decentralised governance through innovation and policy transfer, ‘forum-shopping’, subnational constitutions, and political representation. Electoral quotas in various forms, like reserved seats for women, legislated candidate quotas and voluntary party quota is also another way of bringing in more gender equality within Federalism. The lecture shall highlight how gender and federalism in India operate at the local government level, addressing also the impact and challenges of elected women representatives in local rural governments in India.
About the speaker: Dr. Priyanca Mathur, is currently Head and Associate Professor at the Centre for Research in Social Sciences and Education (CERSSE) Jain University in Bangalore. Previously she was Assistant Professor and P.G. Coordinator at the Master’s Department of Political Science, St. Joseph’s College (Autonomous), Bengaluru. She is a founding Member of the Asia-Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN), a member of Editorial Board of Refugee Law Reader, Hungary, and of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM). An international trainer with UNWomen and the Forum of Federations (FoF), Canada, she has devised modules for FoF on Gender and Decentralisation and conducted Gender and Federalism workshops, as well as 'Training of Trainers’ (ToT) Workshops on Gender for parliamentarians and civil society actors in Myanmar and Thailand. A recipient of the Schomburg Fellowship, Dr. Mathur also taught at Ramapo College, Mahwah, New Jersey. She is the coeditor of a book titled ‘Discovering New India: Multiculturalism, Pluralism, Harmony’ (Jain University Press, 2022).