Men-streaming the Gender Equality Agenda

Gender equality agenda is important enough as not to be left to the care of women alone. The emergence of Gender and Development (GAD) philosophy in the 1980s, to substitute Women in Development (WID) perspective, brought to light that a comprehensive development project can barely be beneficial for the society at large, if it adopts an isolationist stance of engaging only with women to address iniquitous development outcome. Retrospectively speaking, welcome shift in conceptual focus to GAD through Gender in Development (GID), probably facilitated an unintended yet significant contribution towards the newfound realization of men-streaming the gender equality agenda. Structurally and empirically, interdependencies between men and women can neither be set aside nor overlooked even in merely relational sense. As a result, privileging men folks in the gender equality programme would make the endeavour inclusive and thus worthwhile. The present paper seeks to deal with this transition in theory to explore its application in India along with attendant obstacles which may de-rail or inhibit the process. For the said purpose, in addition to introduction and conclusion, this paper has been divided into two interlinked sections. The first section gives an overview of the context. The second section deals with India and in turns expands further to examine: multi-dimensional nature of violence as threat to gender equality; domestic remedies and learning from contemporary international experiences.