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Familymaker Awards - Breaking Gender Stereotype
'Family as Happy Home &Familymaker Award' discussion
was conducted on 8th October and the program was organized under the
joint aegis of Vision Search, GPF India and Khushigram at Noida Auditorium.
On the basis of special contribution and
evaluation in building families, Dr. C.K. Bhardwaj, AkshitaTomar, Ritica Arora,
Radhika Gulati, Krishna Chauhan, Laxman Jha, Madhu Gupta, Anju Aggarwal,
Seema Singh and Priyanka Kumar were awarded the Familymaker Award.The awards
were declared by the jury comprising of Sarvesh Mittal, Asha Mohini and
Vasudha Arora. 
The criteria of selection were involvement, accountability,
responsibility, time spend, values and ethics upheld, human and material resource
management etc. Breaking the gender stereotype, two men were awarded and the
jury felt that more men would come forward to take the responsibility and would
be awarded in future.
Familymaker awards has been commenced by Mona
Mehra of Vision Search to honour the work of homemakers. Over the years she saw
the disrespect faced by her mother and aunts and anybody who takes the
responsibility or accountability of running the household.
A homemaker is
devoid of any gender and her mission became to gain back the respect for a Home
and Homemakers. It takes loads of work to make a home/ family and since the
person doing the task in home does the work themselves and it is free it is not
accepted as work. The doer of the task is mostly mother or a father or could be
any close family member.
Since the benchmark we follow of work is that it has
to be done for money only, this disqualifies a Homemaker to take credit of the
work done and causes so much of mental health issues in them. The constant disrespect
leads to depression, frustration, anger and loss of self-confidence and
self-respect.
The discussion commenced with Ganesh Vandana
and Dr.Markandeya Rai, Advisor to UN Habitat and President of GPF India stated
that the breakdown of family is one of the most tragic events for mankind as
Indian culture has a liberal character and family tradition has been rich in
India since ancient times.
Dr Rashmi Singh, Tax and Mining Secretary, Jammu and
Kashmir, said that the Government of India has made several policy experiments
in ensuring the dignity of Familymakers, mothers, sisters and men. Evaluation
system should be developed.
She also expressed concern over the problems being
faced in family life.Mona Mehra, founder of Vision Search mentioned various
family related problems and stated that the woman who builds the house is not
valued properly, whereas it is her labor that creates the family institution
due to which men are unable to go out and work. Therefore, the creator of the
family should be respected whether he is a man or a woman.
Underlining the importance of family in the
inaugural session, Dr.Surendra Pathak, Professor, Gujarat Vidyapeeth said that
families are the bearers of culture, civilization and values, in Sanatan
culture, it is only with the help of families that sages could attain spiritual
accomplishments and conclusions useful to humans by doing their sadhana.
Moderating
the session, Ajit Kumar, Founder of Khushigram and CEO of Radiance Media, said
that a series of such programs should be organised and in near future India
would again become the golden bird as it was in ancient times.
Familymakers were happy to receive the due recognition and respect which they deserved and felt a
new beginning has been made to strengthen the family institution.