GS Paper I 2018 · Q18
15 marks · 250 words Women, population, poverty & urbanisation X-Ray · Core #22‘Women’s movement in India has not addressed the issues of women of lower social strata.’ Substantiate your view.
Approach · directive: “substantiate”
What it asks · Take a view on whether India's women's movement neglected lower-caste and poor women, backing it with evidence from different phases and noting counter-examples.
It asks 3 things — answer each
- Substantiate: Give evidence across phases that the movement's agenda and leadership neglected lower-caste and poor women
- Substantiate: Weigh the counter-evidence of grassroots and legal advances that reached poorer women
- Substantiate: State a reasoned verdict and the way forward
Open with · India's women's movement grew from 19th-century reform and early organisations such as the WIA (1917) and AIWC (1926), led largely by educated, upper-caste women.
Cover
- Early agenda: AIWC and reform bodies took up education, marriage age, suffrage and legal reform, the concerns of middle-class women.
- Second phase from the mid-1970s: dowry, rape law, harassment and personal law; mostly urban middle-class concerns.
- Dalit critique: caste-based sexual violence, the devadasi system, manual scavenging and wage and land discrimination were ignored; Sharmila Rege's Dalit feminist standpoint; NFDW.
- Representation: the 1996 Women's Reservation Bill debate and demands for quotas within quotas; the 2023 Act reserves one-third seats.
- Counter-evidence: SEWA (1972), Chipko, the anti-arrack movement of the mid-1980s, self-help groups and Mahila Samakhya reached poor women.
- Law: 73rd Amendment reserved one-third panchayat seats, including within SC and ST seats; Vishaka guidelines (1997) from the Bhanwari Devi case.
- Verdict: largely true of the early and urban streams, only partly of the later movement; caste and class gaps persist.
Close with · NCERT itself notes that the Dalit woman's concerns differ from the upper-caste woman's; an intersectional agenda led by poor and Dalit women is the movement's unfinished task.
Add value (verified)
- The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, 2023 seeks to reserve one-third of seats for women in the Lok Sabha, State Assemblies and the Delhi Assembly.Press note on women's empowerment — PIB ↗“the passing of the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, 2023 ) which seeks to reserve one-third of the total number of seats for women in Lok Sabha, State Legislative Assemblies and Delhi Assembly”
Question: UPSC's CS (Main) 2018, GS Paper I — paper ↗. Approach: Minimalist IAS, checked 16 Oct 2026 (how we verify) — UPSC publishes no model answers. ·
Model answer· 350words · Minimalist IAS
India's women's movement grew out of 19th-century reform and early bodies such as the Women's India Association (1917) and the All India Women's Conference (1926), led largely by educated, upper-caste women. The view that it neglected women of the lower strata is largely true of its early and urban phases, but only partly of what followed.
Evidence for the view
- Narrow early agenda: education, marriage age, suffrage and legal reform were middle-class concerns; the AIWC even began by keeping women's welfare apart from politics.
- Urban second phase: the renewal from the mid-1970s took up dowry deaths, rape law and personal law, leaving labouring women's wages, land and health less space.
- The Dalit critique: caste-based sexual violence, the devadasi system and manual scavenging stayed marginal; Sharmila Rege argued for a Dalit feminist standpoint, and Dalit women built the National Federation of Dalit Women.
- Representation gap: the Women's Reservation Bill (from 1996) drew demands for quotas within quotas, a fear that reserved seats would go to elite women.
Counter-evidence
- Grassroots reach: SEWA (1972) organised informal women workers; Chipko women hugged trees, and the anti-arrack movement of the mid-1980s mobilised poor rural women in Andhra Pradesh.
- Law and representation: the 73rd Amendment reserved one-third of panchayat seats for women, including within SC and ST seats; the Vishaka guidelines (1997), born of the Bhanwari Devi case, protected women at work.
- Self-recognition: the movement now accepts that the peasant or Dalit woman faces a different discrimination from the middle-class woman.
- 1926: AIWC founded
- 1972: SEWA
- 1992: 73rd Amendment
- 1997: Vishaka guidelines
- 2023 (since then): Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam
Verdict and way forward
- Partly valid: leadership and agenda stayed elite for long, but intersectional and grassroots streams have widened the movement.
- Next steps: as the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, 2023 (since then) brings one-third reservation to legislatures, Dalit, tribal and working-class women must gain leadership within it, with land rights, decent work and fast justice for caste-based violence.
NCERT itself notes that a Dalit woman's concerns differ from an upper-caste woman's; a movement led by such women, not merely speaking for them, is its unfinished task.
Prepared by Minimalist IAS to the answer standard of Shivam Singh (mentor, 7 years) · facts checked against official sources (how we verify) · updated 16 Oct 2026. UPSC publishes no model answers: compare your structure and coverage with this, then write your own.
