Women in Armed Forces
STORIES, ANALYSES, EXPERT VIEWS
The Supreme Court (SC) has allowed women to sit for the National Defence Academy (NDA) entrance exam this year. Last year, the SC had similarly asked the government to grant permanent commission to women officers of the army serving under the Short Service Commission. Till now, women were eligible for entry into the army through the Officers’ Training Academy and Indian Military Academy. The NDA, which recruits cadets fresh out of school (between the ages of 16 and 19), remained an all-male bastion. This, said the additional solicitor-general appearing for the Union government and the Indian Army, was a policy decision. Justice S K Kaul pointed out that such a policy was premised on “gender discrimination”.
Even if an interim order, the Indian Express writes “the direction to open the doors of the NDA to women is more than symbolic. Taken together with the Centre’s decision to admit girls to ‘Sainik’ (Army) Schools across the country, it lays a roadmap for substantive change. It has the potential of attracting more women to professional life in the military. It creates a wider pool of girls and young women trained for long, ambitious careers in the uniformed services. It also throws up the exciting possibility of a more inclusive re-engineering of the institutions of the armed forces, which, by design and without apology, are conceived of as default male spaces, with women as unnecessary appendages……”
