India the crucible for innovative ideas that can help leap-frog women's empowerment: UN official

India is crucible for invative ideas which can be shared with or developing nations to implement changes that leap-frog women's empowerment and equality for generations ahe, Anita Bhatia, newly-appointed Deputy Executive Director of UN Women, has said. 

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last month appointed Bhatia as Assistant Secretary-General for Resource Manment, Sustainability and Partnerships and Deputy Executive Director of United Nations Entity for Equality and Empowerment of Women (UN Women). Bhatia is senior-most Indian woman in UN system in New York.

"Because of its size, India is really crucible for so many ideas and for implementation of new and invative approaches," Bhatia told press in an interview here.  

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Bhatia said India has implemented several measures and policies towards ensuring women's ecomic empowerment such as National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 and Maternity (Amendment) Bill 2017.  

"se are good (policies) and we need to just build on m and come up with invative and new ways of connecting women, may be using mobile techlogy and digital interventions to implement leap-frog changes so that it is t just one step at a time but you are jumping many generations forward through techlogical interventions," Bhatia said. 

She stressed that India is a "crucible of invation" and one often sees things and ideas being developed re that can really serve or parts of developing world and help enhance ecomic opportunities for women. Bhatia, who assumed her duties on August 1, is senior-most Indian woman in UN system in New York, home to world body's hequarters. Bhatia has h a distinguished career at World Bank Group, serving in various senior leership and manment positions. She brings extensive experience in area of strategic partnerships, resource mobilization and manment.  

She ded that Indian women are succeeding on many levels across sectors and most important thing for women is to have security, safety, protection against domestic violence as well an opportunity to earn a fair living w. UN Women, which alrey has strong partnerships with Indian government, will be furr looking to enhance collaborations with Narendra Modi government to see what are more invative approaches that can be tested. Toger that will allow us to achieve some of se leap-frogging changes. 

Bhatia underscored that she is a strong believer in looking for locally-grounded invation to grow. My dream would be things that we come up with in India, we can pilot and take to or parts of world because n you reduce learning curve for or places and you can have sharing of ideas between developing world. We have answers at home and we should be looking for those models of things that work and scale those up. 

"India can be a crucible for learning and development of how to do things that make a big difference, she said. 

She also stressed that girls' education is single most important tool for change. 

"Investment in human capital of girls and women, that is very critical because investing in this human capital can really change society." she ded

ting that women are a disproportionately large part of informal sector, Bhatia said re is a need to find more ways to bring women out of informal sector or to support m in informal sector and move m to formal sector.  

"I personally think that a focus on women's ecomic empowerment is very important. Activities that can create jobs and that can allow women to stand on ir own two feet are very important, obviously in context of overall poverty rates in India."

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She highlighted need to have policy interventions to enhance ir labour force participation. "India has one of lowest female labour force participation rates in world - at 27 per cent in 2018. That needs to change. We need to see more women engd in labour force, she said. 

"People should feel impact of change of laws that we want to push that help put women on an equal footing," she said.