Why in News:

• India ranked 95th out of 129 countries in a new index, Sustainable Development Goals Gender Index, that measures global gender equality looking at aspects such as poverty, health, education, literacy, political representation and equality at the workplace.

Background:

• Sustainable Development Goals Gender Index
• It has been developed by UK-based Equal Measures 2030, a joint effort of regional and global organisations including African Women’s Development and Communication Network, Asian-Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and International Women’s Health Coalition.
• The new index includes 51 indicators across 14 of the 17 official Sustainable Development Goals and covers 129 countries across all regions of the world.
• The overall index scores are based on a scale of 0–100. A score of 100 indicates the achievement of gender equality in relation to the underlying indicators. A score of 50 would indicate that a country is about halfway to meet its goal. Scores of 59 or below have been rated “very poor”.
• The global average score of the 129 countries-which represents 95% of the world’s girls and
  women- is 65.7 out of 100 (“poor” in the index scoring system).
• This means that almost 1.4 billion, or 40%, of the world’s girls and women, live in countries failing on gender equality and another 1.4 billion live in countries that barely pass.
• India’s score of 56.2 means that it is among 43 countries that fall in the ‘very poor’ category

More in News:

• No one country is the world’s best performer-or even among the world’s top ten performers-across all goals or all issues.
• Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Slovenia, Germany, Canada, Ireland, and Australia rank as the top 10 countries in the index The bottom 10 comprises Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Yemen, Congo, DR Congo and Chad.

India’s Performance

• India’s highest goal scores are on SDG 3 of health (79.9), SDG 2 of hunger and nutrition (76.2) and SDG 7 of energy (71.8).
• India’s lowest goal scores are on SDG 17 of partnerships (18.3, in the bottom 10 countries worldwide on the goal), SDG 9 of industry, infrastructure and innovation (38.1) and SDG 13 of climate (43.4). Some of the factors based on which the ranking of India has been decided include. The proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments (score of 23.6, 16th in the region, women made up 11.8 per cent of parliament in 2018),
• The extent to which a national budget is broken down by factors such as gender, age, income, or region (score of 0.0, tied for worst in the region) and
• Percentage of seats held by women on a country’s Supreme Court or highest court (score of 18.2, 4th worst in the region). India ranks toward the bottom of the Asia and the Pacific region, ranking 17th out of the 23 Asia and the Pacific countries covered by the index.
• China ranked at 74 positions, Pakistan at 113 while Nepal and Bangladesh at 102 and 110 respectively.