Women-led development built into our foreign policy: S Jaishankar at Pravasi Bharatiya Divas

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar emphasised India’s commitment to women-led development, integrating it into the country’s foreign policy.

Speaking at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas panel on ‘Nari Shakti: Celebrating Women’s Leadership and Influence’, he said that women-led development has been a part of India’s foreign policy and stressed the need to integrate women into all aspects of society and the role of women in India’s journey of progressing towards a Viksit Bharat.

Mentioning about G20 Summit, the External Affairs Minister said, “When we chaired G20, we pushed very strongly for women-led development and got it eventually accepted in the G20 conceptual framework”. He also noted that the idea was pushed very strongly during Summit of the Future.

“We do a lot of development cooperation, especially with countries of the global south. We are present in different ways through projects and capacity building in 78 countries and in many of our projects target gender-sensitive issues, women’s equality, and opportunities for them. So this is very much built into our foreign policy”

Speaking about how women’s development is intrinsically tied to the idea of Viksit Bharat, Jaishankar said, “You cannot progress towards Viksit Bharat if you don’t address these issues”

“Until we are able to deal with traditional, historical, societal attitudes; if India is to become a modern, industrial, tech-centric society then we cannot neglect 50 per cent of the talent”.

He highlighted the importance of role models and how the need is to make them into trends. “If they are replicated, internalised, normalised, they actually have a transformational impact on society”.

In his closing remarks, Jaishankar noted that where one metric of measuring Viksit Bharat is through GDP and infrastructure, that is superficial until we address the human side of the progress.

The Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) Convention is the flagship event of the Government of India that provides an important platform to connect and engage with the Indian diaspora and enable them to interact with each other. The 18th Pravasi Bharatiya Divas Convention is being organized in partnership with the State Government of Odisha from January 8 to 10 in Bhubaneswar.

The theme of this PBD Convention is “Diaspora’s Contribution to a Viksit Bharat.” A large number of Indian diaspora members from over 50 different countries have registered to participate in the PBD Convention.