'Implement women's quota bill soon'

Chennai, Jun 15: The opposition AIADMK today said the Women's Reservation Bill should be passed in Parliament and implemented with overwhelming support of all politicial parties ''without any further delay''.

The party, in a press release here, said there should be no further delay in implementing the 33 per cent reservation for women, in the name of making amendments or incorporating new suggestions.

The release said the AIADMK was of the opinion that 33 per cent reservation evisaged for women should be applicable to existing quotas as well. For instance, 33 per cent of the seats reserved for Dalits ''should field Dalit women only as candidates''. In other words, if 30 seats were reserved for the Dalits, a sub-reservation should exist whereby ten seats would go to Dalit women.

This would ensure that women from all segments of the Society will find representation in the government, it said.

The AIADMK said to ensure that there were no regional or constituency-wise inequalities for representation of women, Reserved constituencies must be rotated once in ten years or two terms. For instance, if Chennai North, a Reserved constituency is given for women in 2009, in 2019, Chennai Central should be reserved for women and in 2029, Chennai South would become the Reserved constituency, and so forth.

The party pointed out that though most of the political parties said that they favoured the Women's Reservation Bill, there had been opposition from some quarters. This was the reason for the delay in making the bill into law.

''We understand that the opposition was in two areas: one that the bill would deny adequate representation to oter sections of the society especially the Dalits, BCs, Muslims and other religious minorities and the other that if 33.3 per cent quota for women was added to the already existing 22.5 per cent reservation for SCs and STs, more than 55 per cent of the seats in Parliament would be reserved and this would not be fair to other sections of the population,'' the release quoted the party as saying.

Politics was one area which was highly male dominated, the AIADMK pointed out, adding although there had been a woman Prime Minister and several woman Chief Ministers in various states, the representation of women in Parliament and the state legislatures did not reflect their demographic representation.

UNI