At ActionAid India, we have been working with the poorest and most excluded communities since 1972, taking sides with them in their struggle to claim social justice. All throughout our 41 years of work, we have put great emphasis on the need to assert women and girls’ rights as human rights. Yes, unfortunately, we have seen in our four decades of experience that women and girls are not treated as equals or even as a human being. The dismal Child Sex Ratio (number of girls to every 1000 boys between the ages of 0-6) is yet another brutal manifestation of the larger system of patriarchy combined with the current culture of greed. We realised that this menacing combination can only be thwarted by collective action – led by all the people who stand by the ideas of social justice and gender equality. A declining child-sex ratio, emanating primarily from the resistance most families have in bearing a daughter, is a manifestation of the many evils of patriarchy – a system that believes men are superior to women – socially, culturally, politically and economically. It is this system of patriarchy, which has been around since many centuries, now manifesting in the form of – sex-selective discrimination, dismal infant mortality rates of girls, lack of access to health-care and education for girls, early marriage, forced pregnancies, dowry deaths, domestic violence, lack of sexual autonomy and choice, wage inequality, exclusion from economic participation, landlessness, lack of political participation etc. To provide an isolated solution to address this decline in child-sex ratio is rather difficult. All these manifestations, which has its origins in patriarchy, must change – or in other words, the DOMINANT MINDSET that treats men as superior to women – in our homes and outside – MUST BE DEFEATED. is a coming together of various social movements and organisations in this larger vision to defeat patriarchy and improve the state of affairs of women and girls in the country.
