Tamil Nadu Industries Minister TRB Rajaa urged for greater participation of women in politics. “I welcome you all into politics. This is not a pitch for my party. It is time that you look into politics as a genuine step to be changed,” he said at The Hindu’s Tamil Nadu Women’s Summit 2024, calling for greater participation of women in politics.
The event on Tuesday was held in association with Guidance Tamil Nadu.
“It is difficult, but we are here to make it easy for you. Choose whatever party you want to be, but please choose wisely. Politics is key. If you want to be the change, you need to come and step in and ensure that you can make that,” he added.
Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, Partner, Catalincs & former CMD, Cognizant India, while moderating a session on Women in IT: from Coding to Leading, said Tamil Nadu leads the chart on Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in Higher Education at over 47 per cent. This is the highest among large States in the country. Women’s GER is higher than that of men. Tamil Nadu is one of the States that can potentially claim it, he said.
Schemes for empowerment of women
In the last few months to a year, there are three main developments that are likely to widen the gap with women marching forward even more. The first is the recently launched Pudumai Penn scheme by the Tamil Nadu government providing financial support for people pursuing education right up to graduation. The second is, 22,000 seats have been added in Computer Science across engineering institutions in Tamil Nadu, and a significant proportion of women take to computing.
The third was that in the Union Budget, the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has earmarked an outlay of about ₹3 lakh crore specifically focused on women development, including building women hostels; self-help groups, he said.
Interlocking the govt movement
Responding to a question on how these interventions by the government would help women, Srimathi Shivashankar, Global Head - EdTech Services Business, HCL Tech, said, “we are in a very important juncture at this point in time. We need to interlock the government movement to accelerate women as an integral part of economic growth and not social justice.”
“All the time, the word empowerment simply killed us. I don’t know why women need to be empowered when we are caregivers; caretakers; money makers and money managers,” she said.
In smaller towns, which are the talent hubs, there are a larger number of women who are 35 and above; fantastic engineers, they do their masters, PhD; double PhD, but not knowing what to do. To me, the economy is there and the pulse of Tamil Nadu is there. Either the IT industry of GCC take the work to where workers are, or enable women to get enrolled from those locations, she said.