Emphasising that all around there is an ecosystem that is affirmative for women, Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar said they are breaking every ceiling and they are in combat positions in defence forces.

”Women have tested development, women of this country at the moment are most aspirational and when a segment is most aspirational, the challenges are enormous because energy has to be regulated. I have no doubt, without the contribution of half of humanity, neither the planet can be happy nor the nation can prosper,” he said while addressing the Foundation Day of National Commission for Women (NCW) here.

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He underlined the fact that subtle discrimination is the greatest challenge for women.”Subtle discrimination, discrimination which is refined at workplace, in politics, or otherwise, is a greatest challenge to your gender because, you can’t make an issue of subtle discrimination but subtle discrimination is very painful.”

He expressed the hope that the Commission would brainstorm and generate a national claim that this subtle discrimination gets resonance.

”Second, the normal urge, the male urge to dominate, is not sublime human instinct. It does not fit in our human soul but we can’t deny that men are ever inclined to dominate. This dominance has to end, this dominance is psychologically depressing for women because when it comes to meritocracy and talent, they are next to none,” he added.

Dhankhar urged that ”let us create a system in trade, industry, commerce, business, politics, academia, and the like, that in fiscal reward women should be on equal footing. Unfortunately, this is not the trend.”

The VP urged that the Commission has to deal with this issue, because these are the issues.
”Today we think there is a woman bureaucrat, a woman scientist, a woman entrepreneur, a woman academic, a woman vice-chancellor. But their challenges are different from their codes. We must genuinely work to bring about the most authentic equality, gender equality,” he said.

The Vice-President urged the Commission to set a new trend of information dissemination. ”I would urge the Commission to set a new trend, the trend is information dissemination and constructive persuasion, generating sensation or using coercive mechanisms to hit the headlines should be the last priority if not to be avoided at all. We have seen that the best of the works being done are tempted by isolated instances only to generate sensation and hit the headlines.”

He stressed that there must be a culture to work in silence in a subterranean area. ”I would urge the media to be extremely sensitive. It is easy for a media person to sit on the desk and create sensation, go into the minor details, micro details of an incident, ignoring the overall system, which is extremely soothing. I would therefore urge that this will shortly be adopted,” he suggested.

Vice-President Dhankhar pointed out that NCW’s role is twofold. ”NCW has to be North Star when women organisations or individual women look for guidance and that has to be the fundamental situation. They must look up to you, for guidance, for development, for progress. And when it comes to some kind of difficulties, then it has to act the other way around.”