News Desk
ISLAMABAD: Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN) has urged for introducing divisional quotas for women-reserved seats in both the National and Provincial Assemblies to ensure the geographical representation of women and incentivize their larger political role in the areas where it is marginal.
In this disregard, the spirit of the reservation, such as greater representation, and the existing method of considering the whole province as a single constituency on the reserved seats do not stop the political parties to pick the candidates from any areas of their choice.
The practice has resulted in an uneven distribution of quotas, with few districts and divisions monopolizing the representation while the rest of the regions remain unrepresented.
Current representation
FAFEN said in a statement that in the current National Assembly, as many as 5 out of twenty-nine administrative divisions across Pakistan are over-represented in terms of the women-reserved seats, 8 are represented proportionately to their population, while sixteen have zero representation at all.
Presently, 57% of the representatives elected on the reserved seats for female candidates in the National Assembly are residents of only 6 cities Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Quetta, Karachi, and Lahore – as per their nomination documents.
It said that, likewise, most representatives elected on reserved seats of the provincial assemblies in 2018 had registered residential addresses in the provincial capitals in their nomination documents.
It said as many as 59% of women members elected on reserved seats in the Punjab Assembly belonged to Lahore, 66% in Sindh Assembly from Karachi, 73% in Balochistan Assembly from Quetta, and 50% in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly from Peshawar. –APP
