To an auditorium filled with women, actor Gautami Tadimalla, founder of Life Again Foundation, shared her perspective of life and spoke at length on how women, despite the numerous limitations and discriminations they faced, should go forward, walk the chosen path and live their life to the fullest according to their dreams.
“I am very much aware of the kind of limitations women faced every day, discrimination that girls face, perhaps even before birth, and burdens placed on a girl and on a woman simply because of the gender that she is,” she said at the International Women’s Day celebrations at VIT on Monday.
“When you understand yourself, when you make a commitment to yourself as to the kind of person you want to be, and as to the kind of life you want to live, it is entirely in your hands to walk that path,” she told the audience.
She said that if there was a problem, women should find a way to understand it, relate to it in order to find a solution. “A woman will always find a solution,” she said.
Appalled by the kind of atrocities that children and women were subjected to, the first thing that the actor taught her daughter was to say “no” and the next being “why”. “Today, we are truly living in a world that is on the cusp. Today’s population has an opportunity like no other to literally start changing and defining the direction that our country is going to take,” she stated.
G. Viswanathan, chancellor of VIT, said modern India was trying to restore whatever was lost to women. “In the legislatures and Parliament, the representation of women is poor in India. It is about 12%. In many African countries, it is about 50% to 60%,” he said. He added that education was the means to empower women. Gross Enrolment Ratio — access to higher education — was 24% to 25% on the national level, he said and added that the percentage of women was much lower than men.
Through the Universal Higher Education Trust, 4,000 scholarships had been given in the last five years. Of this, 66% were girls, he said.
Poor representation
Urging that women should participate in the labour force, he said women accounted for 28% of the workforce in India, while they accounted for 49% of the country’s population. “In Japan, China and Korea, women accounted for 65% to 70% of the workforce. We have a long way to go. Unless, women come up equally in education and workforce, we cannot make economic progress,” he said.
Pushpa Kurup, managing director, Vitalect Technologies India (P) Ltd., said the 21st century was the turn around century for women. “Women empowerment is an idea whose time has come,” she said. VIT vice-president G.V. Selvam spoke.
Published - March 13, 2018 12:11 am IST
