Female peacekeeping unit earns India a pat

The United Nations has appreciated India's decision to provide a 125-member all female police unit for peacekeeping and has sought more women officers for its missions to increase the 'efficiency and credibility' of operations.

Expressing concern over the current low numbers of women in the peacekeeping operations, a United Nations-backed conference has called for their number to be doubled every year for the next few years, asserting that this would not only improve the efficiency of peacekeeping but also its credibility.

Currently only one per cent of military personnel and only four per cent of the police are women, Comfort Lamptey, Gender Adviser of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, told reporters on the second day of a landmark two-day meeting to discuss gender disparity in peacekeeping on Wednesday.

The meet praised India's decision to provide a 125-member all female police unit for peacekeeping operations.

"Our current picture is rather disheartening. Women constitute only 746 military personnel while the male peacekeepers number 63,862; and in the case of the police, women only make up 314 of the personnel we have worldwide out of 7,408," Lamptey said, explaining why the UN called for the meeting with troop and police contributing countries.

"We are asking member states to double the numbers of women being deployed every year for the next few years, and that they also as a monitoring mechanism disaggregate: we want to make sure that in all reporting that we do that the statistics on women and men deployed are disaggregated," she added.