Post date: Oct 22, 2012 9:30:8 AM
Lawmaker of India's regional Bahujan Samaj Party, Rajpal Singh Saini says that children, particularly girls, should not be given mobile phones, as they get distracted.
MUZAFFARNAGAR, UTTAR PRADESH, INDIA (OCTOBER 21, 2012) (ANI) - Lawmaker of India's regional Bahujan Samaj Party, Rajpal Singh Saini said that children, particularly girls, should not be given mobile phones, as they get distracted.
While speaking to a gathering in Muzaffarnagar district of the northern Uttar Pradeshstate on Sunday (October 21), Saini said that his mother and sisters did not have mobile phones during their childhood and that it did not make any big difference."Just don't give mobile phones to your children. I say it everywhere in my speeches. What work of theirs is getting stopped without it? Why girls are constantly engaged with it? Take them away instantly. When our mothers, sisters and wife were young then we did not have mobiles. They did not die without it," said Saini.
Saini said that once he had advised a poor man, who was already upset by the abduction of his daughter, that it was wrong to give mobile phones to girls.
Meanwhile, chairperson of the national commission for women (NCW), Mamata Sharma, while speaking in New Delhi called the lawmaker's comment as chauvinistic and misplaced in today's times.
"I think it's a very rigid thinking on his part. I don't understand why the difference between a girl and a boy. On one hand we talk of female equality and one hand we talk such things. This is totally wrong. Such discrimination should not be done in today's times," said Sharma.
Earlier this month, a leader of India's ruling Congress party, Dharamvir Goyat had blamed women for the surge in rape cases adding that 90 per cent of rapes were infact consensual.
In 2011, 24,206 rape cases were reported, according to India's National Crime Records Bureau - a figure which gender rights activists say is a gross under estimation.