While growing up in South Asia is a perpetual struggle, to be a woman in this region is to be a non-person.
Women bear the greatest burden of human deprivation in South Asia.
Five years ago, when some 17,000 government delegates and 30,000 civil society representatives met for the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the situation of South Asian women was one of the bleakest faced by women in any part of the world. That bleak scenario, remarkable in itself, was all the more depressing given that, as the Beijing Conference began in 1995, the Prime Ministers of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, as well as the President of Sri Lanka, were all women. Indeed, those countries were headed by women who proclaimed their whole-hearted support for gender equality. Five years after those optimistic words, however, women in South Asia remain far behind men in enjoying basic human rights, let alone in participating on an equal footing with men in educational institutions, the job market or in government. As a region, South Asia has both the lowest literacy rates and the largest gap between the rates of male and female literacy - 64.1 per cent and 37.2 per cent respectively in 1997.