By Anjum J Parveen

India loves a woman who makes it proud. We celebrate the daughter who wins a medal, the scientist who makes history, the entrepreneur who builds an empire against the odds. We share her photograph, call her an inspiration, and tell our daughters to dream big.

But what about the woman whose story never makes the newspaper? The woman whose work begins before sunrise and ends long after everyone else has rested?

The girl whose education ends not because she lacks ability, but because her family believes it is time for her to marry?

Their stories rarely receive the same applause. India has changed. More women are studying, working, running businesses, and questioning traditions that once went unchallenged. Many families are investing in their daughters’ futures. This progress is real, and it deserves recognition. But progress does not reach every woman in the same way.

In our villages, women work in the fields, collect water, care for livestock, raise children, and return home to cook and clean. Much of their labour goes unpaid and unnoticed.

In smaller towns, a girl’s education may end because marriage is considered more important than her ambitions.

In cities, a woman may earn her own salary and still carry the greater share of household responsibilities.

Different lives, different struggles. Yet the question remains the same: how much say does a woman really have over her own life?

Poverty, caste discrimination, limited healthcare, unsafe transport, and unequal access to education can make a woman’s choices even narrower. We cannot speak about women’s empowerment as though every woman begins from the same place.

There is another contradiction we need to confront. We tell girls to be independent, but become uncomfortable when their independence challenges our preferences.

We encourage daughters to study, then expect them to seek permission for decisions their brothers make freely.

We speak of protecting women, yet too often protection means restricting where they go, what they wear, and whom they meet.

We teach girls to be careful. We must also teach boys to respect boundaries and hold people accountable for their actions.

A woman’s safety cannot depend on how much of her freedom she is willing to surrender. And we need to rethink the praise we give women. The patient wife, the sacrificing mother, the daughter who never objects. These qualities may come from love, but they should never become compulsory.

A woman can care for her family without disappearing into its needs. She can respect her parents and still disagree with them. Saying no does not make her selfish.

Change must begin in our homes. Sons must share domestic work without expecting praise for doing what their sisters have always been expected to do.

Daughters must have a voice in decisions about education, marriage, careers, and money. Schools must teach respect and consent.

Workplaces must recognise caregiving as a shared responsibility, not a woman’s professional weakness.

Mothers, too, must be allowed to question the restrictions they were once taught to accept. Suffering through an unfair tradition does not make it right to pass it on.

I have hope in the families that are changing, in the daughters who are asking difficult questions, and in the parents who are learning to listen. But hope should not become an excuse to ignore how much remains unfinished.

We should not measure India’s progress only by the women who reach positions of power. We must also look at the girl who leaves school too soon, the woman whose labour goes unnoticed, the wife whose earnings do not give her a voice, and the mother who has forgotten what she once wanted for herself. They do not need our pity. They need opportunity, dignity, resources, and the freedom to make decisions about their own lives.

A woman should not have to become a national achiever to deserve respect. She should not have to be exceptionally brave to choose her profession, exceptionally patient to keep her family together, or exceptionally strong to live with expectations that should never have been hers alone.

Perhaps we need to stop asking women how much they can endure and start asking why so much is expected of them in the first place.

India’s progress cannot be measured only by how many women reach positions of power. It must also be measured by what happens in ordinary homes, in everyday conversations, and in decisions that never make the news. A woman should not have to become exceptional to deserve equality. She should not have to fight for the ordinary right to choose. Until that becomes true for women in our villages, our small towns, and our cities, our celebration of women’s progress will remain incomplete.