She voters | The silent revolution
It was a tiny sliver—a mere 0.16 percentage points—but it became the biggest story of the 2019 general election. That year, for the first time in India’s parliamentary history, the turnout of women voters (67.18 per cent) exceeded that for men (67.02), reversing the gender gap. It was a small step, but it made Indian women equal arbiters of the nation’s political destiny. And the tide is only rising. This election, there has been a 7.5 per cent increase in the number of registered women voters, to 471 million from 438 million in 2019, higher than the five per cent for men. It will include 8.5 million first-time women voters, or those who have attained voting age. The gender elector ratio, or the number of women per 1,000 men, too, has gone up, to 948 from 926 in the previous election. ...