7 Arunachal districts ‘gender critical’: survey

ITANAGAR, Dec 11 – Seven districts in Arunachal Pradesh have been identified as ‘gender critical’ by a survey conducted by the North East Society for Promotion of Youth and Masses (NESPYM).

“Dibang Valley, Lohit, Tawang, Upper Siang, West Siang, East Kameng and Tirap have been termed as gender critical,” NESPYM regional coordinator Chiranjeev Kakoty said during a day-long state level training on population enumeration organised by the Director of census operations here yesterday.

“The observation was based on the low sex ratio, low female work participation and low female literacy rate of the districts,” he said.

NESPYM, an alliance resource partner supporting functionaries engaged for Census 2011, would impart additional training to supervisors and enumerators under the gender module, focussing on pro-women and gender-sensitive data, he said.

“The special focus area of Census 2011 is being laid on gender responsive census,” Kotoky added. He also dwelt on the issue of inclusion of third gender in the census data.

The training programme gave special focus to gender responsive census and people with disabilities, so that status of women and disabled are projected properly in the Census 2011 data. The training was conducted in view of the upcoming second phase of population enumeration for preparation of the census 2011, scheduled for February 9 to 28 next.

State’s Principal Secretary Yeshi Tsering in his address underlined the importance of census data in providing information for planning and policy formulation for various development schemes by the Centre and the State governments.

He said that delimitation of Assembly and parliamentary segments and devolution of fund by the Centre were based on census.