International Conference 2025

Reflections on the Past, Looking to the Future: Fifty Years of Towards Equality

Dates: 3rd -5th  March 2025
Venue: India International Centre, New Delhi

The Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), Delhi, is pleased to announce an international conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the seminal Towards Equality report. This landmark document, produced by the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI) in 1975, was the first comprehensive examination of women’s status in independent India. Its publication sparked widespread discussions on critical aspects of women’s lives, galvanizing debates on the issues of women’s status and rights. The report played a catalytic role, with the decades following its publication witnessing a new visibility for women’s movements and the emergence of women’s studies.

Reflections on the Past, Looking to the Future seeks to revisit the Towards Equality report as a foundation for discussing the evolution of women’s status in India over the past five decades. At a time when official data was limited, the authors of the report brought together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, combining this with direct field engagements across the country. This contributed to the report’s seminal multidisciplinary character. It made the important observation that in our complex and highly diverse society—encompassing various religious groups, caste levels, economic strata, and individuals from tribal, rural, and urban areas—women cannot be treated as a homogeneous group Despite its critique of the adverse conditions faced by women, the report remained hopeful about the role of state-led development in promoting social transformation. However, the economic liberalization of the 1990s and the subsequent shifts in state policies have drastically altered the material realities of women’s lives, challenging the frameworks established by the report. In the five decades since Towards Equality report in India, discourses on women’s issues have become even more amplified and diversified. Scholars and activists today identify new complexities and multiple points of inflection in policy, material realities, and the terms of discourse on gender. These complexities are reflected in the evolving relationship between women’s studies and women’s movements, as well as their interface with the state and institutional politics. While gender as a category has been mainstreamed, gender studies and social movements are grappling with new uncertainties, leading to increasingly fraught relations and challenges for the new generation of scholars and activists.

At this juncture, looking to the future inevitably requires reflecting on the past, for which Towards Equality remains a powerful and grounded benchmark for women’s movements and women’s studies in India and the Global South. Against this backdrop, CWDS proposes to host an international conference, using the Towards Equality report as a starting point to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue, debate, and discussion. We hope  this initiative will foster the development of new methodologies and frameworks for a nuanced understanding of women’s lives.

 Call for Papers

We invite submissions that engage with the following themes:

The Papers should be related to the Towards Equality Report. 

Violence: The Substratum of Gender Inequality and Inequity
Inequality, Gender and Education
Gender and Chronic Health Conditions – Intersectional Experiences
Women and Political Participation
Women as Workers: Interconnections, Exclusions and Nuances

Important Dates

  • Abstract Submission Deadline: 10.12.2024
  • Notification of Acceptance: 20.12.2024
  • Full Paper Submission Deadline: 31.01.2025

There is no registration fee for the conference.  All paper presenters will be reimbursed 3rd AC train fare. Boarding and lodging will also be provided during the days of the conference.

Contact Information

For further details please contact the organizing committee at  teconf2025@cwds.ac.in.