WOMEN AND HUMAN RIGHTS CHALLENGES IN ERA OF GLOBALISATION

In India at present ‘cultural ideal’ is one of the major reasons for women’s oppression. The cultural ideal is that women should smile endlessly whatever unreasonable the demand on her is, and harmful the consequence on her is. It is a harsh reality that women have been ill-treated in every society for ages an India is no exception. The irony lies in fact that in our country where women are worshipped as Shakti, the atrocities are committed against her in all sections of life. She is being looked down as commodity or as a slave, she is not robbed of her dignity and pride outside her house but she also faces ill-treatment and other atrocities within the four walls of her house. They are discriminated at two levels, firstly they suffer because of their gender and secondly due to grinding poverty. Women are deprived of economic resources and are dependent on men for their living. The root cause of all the evil practices faced by the women are (1) Illiteracy, (2) Economic Dependence, (3) Caste Restrictions, (4) Religious Prohibition, (5) Lack Of Leadership Qualities And (6) Apathetic And Callous Attitude Of Males In The Society. In larger context human rights refer to those inalienable rights that a person is entitled to enjoy irrespective of his/ her nationality, caste, creed, sex, colour, age, religion, income or any other socioeconomic divisive category. Human rights are those rights entitlements which an individual owns just because of his/her existence as a human being. The theoretical roots of human rights can be traced back to the history of ancient and medieval times in India as well as in the Western liberal and humanitarian philosophy. Both these roots have a considerable appeal of promoting human dignity. Human life is given a distinctive weight over other animals in most societies precisely because we are capable of cultivating the quality of our lives. Clearly both-human dignity and quality of life have negatively affected women’s human rights especially with the coming of globalization to a large number of countries. In the name of Structural Adjustment policies, publicly-funded health services education and child care have contributed to maternal mortality, made education unavailable for poorer children, particularly girls. The paper aims to examine the challenges of women in globalization in regards to their rights in larger interest of women community as a whole with focus on developing countries or India like to give them a life with equality and human dignity