The government of India has shown the progressive approach once again towards the security of young widows in the country and outlined ambitious plans to take care of such women living mainly in religious cities in north India. Minister for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury wants them to overcome poverty, lead lives comfortably and get remarried, if they want.

Widow marriage is not a popular and common phenomenon in India and several of sections of society frown on widows remarrying. According to a data, there are 33 million widows in India and many of them are poor and some have become widow at very young age.

Earlier, the successive governments had also taken some initiatives aimed at improving their lives but the schemes failed to achieve even little success. There is a need to take tough initiatives to work positively in this direction now. The widows are said to be a silent and invisible community and they don’t even know what are their basic and democratic rights in the country.

They mostly live their lives on the mercy of their relatives or other members of the family. A woman quickly loses her dignity, even her basic rights, if her husband dies. Most of the times, relative and family members even dumped such women in some of the religious towns such as Vrindavan and Haridwar.

Another study reports that more than 3,000 widows living in Vrindavan without any kind of support from their family members. Hundreds of other such women live in cities such as Brajbhumi, Goverdhan and Mathura. Most of the widows are surviving on charity and some of them are reduced to begging on the streets to survive.

Renuka Chowdhury said:

We will see how we can organize forums where eligible young men will come forward to meet these ladies. We always talk about helping widows, but in actual fact, very little gets done.

Why else would so many widows find themselves utterly helpless and destitute in religious towns like Mathura and Vrindavan.

Chowdhary also said that there was a need to rehabilitate them with training to allow them to live their lives with financial self-dependency.

She further said:

We’ve often had a good response whenever we tried to organise matches for young women who’d been brought up in orphanages.

However, some sociologists have their own fears and they said that it might not be easy as Hindu religion frowns on remarriages of widows. According to them, some of the surveys have clearly indicated that the religious beliefs and fear of violating social customs actually forced many widows and they decided not to take such steps against the social and religious traditions and customs.

The 1856 Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act actually grants women the legal right to remarry and the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 gives women the same inheritance rights as men. The problem is that such rights are rarely put into practice.

There are different social rules in different social groups for the remarriage of widows. Some of the lower-ranking groups allow widow remarriage, especially the woman is relatively young, but the higher-ranking castes discourage such practices.

In September 2001, a meeting of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), representatives of the Department of Women and Child Development, Human Resource Development Ministry was held and Justice JS Verma said at the meeting:

It is unfortunate that nothing substantial seems to have happened to elevate the status of women who hence come to Vrindavan despite the philanthropic attitude of the people in the country to help others.

The need of the hour is to take concrete steps to stop the flow of women to Vrindavan and simultaneously carry out rehabilitation programs whereby the overall plight of these women can be improved.

In India, the incidence of widowhood rises sharply with age and the data says that 64 per cent among women of 60 years of age and more and 80 per cent among women aged 70 are widow. This is a common view that the Indian woman, who survives to old age, is definite to become a widow.

The same isn’t the case with Indian men as according to a data, only 2.5 per cent of Indian men are widowers because male mortality rates are higher than female on average in the country.

The common people in India have a mindset that sees a woman’s identity only through the male around her. It has not really changed but there is a need to change it. The traditional Hindu blessing for a married woman is ‘Sadaa Sowbhagyawati Bhavaa’ and it actually made the widow marginalised and reduced to a social non-entity.