(a) What are the main factors responsible for gender inequality in India? Discuss the contribution of Savitribai Phule in this regard. (b) "The current internet expansion has instilled a different set of cultural values which are often in conflict with traditional values.' Discuss.

(a) Factors of gender inequality, and Savitribai Phule

• Patriarchy as a social structure: the male line as default owner of land, name, ritual and the street after dark.
• Economic factors: unpaid care work, a gendered labour market, the gender pay gap, and property that still often flows around daughters despite the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005.
• Education and health: dropout of girls after puberty, poor toilets, anaemia, and maternal risk that treats a woman’s body as a fertility instrument rather than as a citizen.
• Violence and fear: domestic violence, dowry, sexual harassment, trafficking, and the “safety” argument that then locks the girl at home instead of policing the harasser.
• Political under-representation: reserved panchayat seats exist; cabinets, party tickets and police leadership still lag, so the file is written about women more than with them.
• Caste and minority intersection: a Dalit or Adivasi woman, or a woman in a ghetto, meets two or three inequalities at once. Gender policy that sees only the urban middle class will miss her.
• Technology and work: digital public services that assume a husband’s phone; platform work without maternity or safety.
• Son preference, sex ratio and unpaid girl-child labour in sibling care are demographic and ethical facts, not only “culture.”
• Law is not absent — PCPNDT, POSH, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, criminal law on sexual offences — but implementation, stigma and delay keep inequality alive.
• Savitribai Phule (1831–1897): with Jyotirao Phule she opened a school for girls in Pune in 1848, when teaching a girl, especially a lower-caste girl, was treated as pollution.
• She taught, wrote, and faced abuse on the walk to school; the story of the sari thrown with dung is the cost of that public ethic.
• She worked for widow dignity, against child marriage, and for the education of those the varna order had declared unteachable — a gender and caste intervention together.
• The Balhatya Pratibandhak Griha and her poetry treated infanticide and women’s pain as public wrongs, not as family secrets.
• Contribution in this regard: she proved that gender inequality is not fate; it is a taught exclusion that a school and a stubborn teacher can begin to reverse. Today’s Article 15 and 21A sit on that stubbornness.
• The unfinished work she named is still the syllabus: get the girl to school, keep her there, and refuse the purity rule that polices her body.

(b) Internet cultural values versus traditional values

• The statement is largely true as a description of conflict, and incomplete if it treats “tradition” as only virtue and “internet” as only vice.
• Internet-instilled values: speed, display of the self, weak gatekeepers, global peer groups, a market for attention, and a habit of speaking to strangers.
• Traditional values (in the Indian working sense): family hierarchy, face-saving, local reputation, ritual time, and duties that bind a person to kin and community before the self.
• Conflicts that are real: elder authority versus a young person who finds facts and allies online; arranged-match secrecy versus dating apps; sexual shame versus information (and also versus pornography); khap-like honour versus a woman who can call a helpline.
• Conflicts that injure: rumour and communal deepfakes travel faster than a priest’s or a teacher’s correction; suicide contagion; cyberstalking; and a child who is never off the stage of classmates.
• Conflicts that can be healthy: a Dalit student finding Ambedkar without a hostile classroom; a queer person finding that they are not alone; a farmer finding a price; a patient finding a second medical opinion.
• Traditional values that deserve defence: care for the old, truth-telling in the panchayat sense of not destroying a neighbour with a lie, hospitality, and restraint in speech — all of which trolling violates.
• Traditional values that deserve challenge: untouchability, the silence around domestic violence, and the idea that a girl’s phone is a family’s honour to confiscate.
• Ethical navigation: digital literacy, the Information Technology Act, 2000 and intermediary rules as law not as panic, POSH-like workplace norms for online work, and family conversation that is not a raid.
• The civil servant’s task: use the net for service delivery and warning, punish the crime (hate, child sexual content, stalking), and do not confuse a viral clip with a riot that must be answered by an illegal blow.
• Close: expansion has instilled a different value-set. The adult response is to keep the traditional duties that protect persons, drop those that cage them, and regulate the net’s harms without a nostalgic ban on knowledge.