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Journalism of Courage
The Women’s Reservation Bill was tabled during the first day of House proceedings in the new Parliament House on Tuesday (September 19) by Union Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal, amid a ruckus in the Lok Sabha.
The Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, earlier on Monday cleared the Bill — it seeks to provide a 33% quota to women in Parliament and state legislatures. The legislation, however, may not be implemented in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, sources told The Indian Express. They added that it will be rolled out only after the delimitation process is over, most probably in 2029.
Currently, India’s lower house, Lok Sabha, has 78 elected women MPs out of the total 543 seats — 14.36% of the total number of MPs are women. Here is a look at women’s representation in the lower house of 10 other democratic countries. All the data has been sourced from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU).
| Countries | No. of seats available | Women members | per cent |
| USA | 435 | 125 | 28.7 |
| United Kingdom | 649 | 224 | 34.5 |
| South Africa | 398 | 184 | 46.2 |
| South Korea | 299 | 57 | 19.1 |
| Japan | 462 | 46 | 10.0 |
| Germany | 736 | 258 | 35.1 |
| France | 577 | 218 | 37.8 |
| Canada | 336 | 103 | 30.7 |
| Brazil | 513 | 90 | 17.5 |
| Australia | 151 | 58 | 38.4 |
Note: The data for the USA, Australia, France, Brazil is as of 2022, for Canada, Germany, Japan is as of 2021, for South Korea it is for 2020, and for the UK, South Africa, it is as of 2019.
