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As autumn approaches, artisans across India begin shaping clay into divine forms.
Durga rises first — ten arms radiating power as she strikes down the demon Mahishasura. Then comes Kali — fierce and unbridled, dancing in righteous fury against injustice. These images, repeated every year across thousands of temples and festival pandals, have long defined India’s civilisational imagination.
They embody Shakti — the primordial feminine power. Durga is courage. Kali is defiance. Saraswati is wisdom. Lakshmi is prosperity. Few cultures have elevated the feminine principle so prominently in myth and ritual.
Which is why the political invocation of “Nari Shakti” comes so easily in India.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly used the phrase to frame women’s empowerment as central to India’s future. Parliament is now preparing to expand women’s representation through the long-pending Women’s Reservation Bill, which seeks to increase women’s presence in legislatures.
The symbolism is powerful: a civilisation that worships the goddess promising greater power to women.
But symbolism has never been India’s problem. Reality tells a harsher story. Millions of Indian women seem to need those extra arms simply to carry the unpaid burdens of home, work and family.
India has produced remarkable women leaders — Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who built Biocon into a biotechnology powerhouse, and Arundhati Bhattacharya, the first woman to chair the State Bank of India. Their achievements are rightly celebrated.
Yet they remain the exception rather than the rule.
Across corporate India, women hold barely about one-fifth of board seats and fewer than 5% of chief executive positions. Even where women enter the workforce in significant numbers, they account for only about 13% of senior leadership roles.
The glass ceiling remains stubbornly intact.
Beyond the corporate world, the struggles continue further down the economic ladder. India’s female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) hovers around 35–40%, among the lowest for major economies. Of those who do work, more than 80% are in the informal economy — agriculture, domestic work, construction and daily-wage labour — often without job security, social protection or fair wages.
Women performing similar work frequently earn significantly less than men. Studies estimate that Indian women earn about 30–35% less than their male counterparts on average. The gap is visible across sectors. In construction and agricultural labour — where millions of women work as daily-wage workers — female labourers are often paid ₹200–₹300 a day less than men for comparable work.
Even in white-collar sectors the disparity persists. Surveys of organised industry suggest women earn roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of male salaries for similar roles.
The inequality does not end with economics.
Violence against women continues to puncture the national conscience. Certain cases have become grim markers in recent memory: Bilkis Bano in 2002, the Delhi gang rape in 2012, and Hathras in 2020. Each provoked national outrage, yet each also exposed the same uncomfortable truth — misogyny in India is not an aberration but a persistent feature of social life.
In India, gender discrimination often begins even before a girl is born.
Despite strict legal prohibitions on prenatal sex selection, the country’s child sex ratio remains around 919 girls for every 1,000 boys. Economist Amartya Sen famously described this demographic distortion as the tragedy of “missing women.” A study published in The Lancet in 2018 estimated that over 12.1 million female births were “missing” in India between 1980 and 2010 due to sex-selective abortions.
India reveres the goddess — yet millions of daughters have quietly disappeared.
International comparisons reinforce the contradiction. In the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index 2025, India ranks 131/148 with 64.1% parity and is among the lowest-ranked in South Asia, leading only Maldives and Pakistan. Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka perform better on several indicators of gender equality.
A civilisation that celebrates feminine divinity continues to struggle with the lived condition of its women.
Patriarchy in India does not reside only in laws or institutions. It is embedded in everyday choices — preference for sons, unequal opportunities in education and employment, tolerance of harassment, and the quiet expectation that women must constantly negotiate the boundaries of safety.
Against this backdrop, expanding women’s representation in Parliament is certainly welcome.
But representation alone cannot dismantle centuries of social conditioning. More seats in legislatures will not erase wage gaps, prevent violence, or transform deeply rooted attitudes.
Without wider change — in homes, workplaces and institutions — parliamentary reservation risks becoming little more than a political gesture.
India will continue to celebrate Durga’s triumph over evil and chant hymns to Kali’s fearless power. But the real measure of Nari Shakti will not lie in temples or parliamentary speeches. It will lie in whether the ordinary woman in India can live with dignity, opportunity and safety. Until that happens, the goddess will remain enthroned in our festivals — while the woman still waits outside the temple gates.
Author Bio: Aloka Sengupta is a healthcare professional with over four decades of experience in the biopharmaceutical and healthcare sector across the world, writing on health, international affairs and geopolitics.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.