Why is a medical institute in Bihar asking employees details about 'virginity'?
Everyone knows filling details on an employment form can be tedious, but one can rarely imagine a situation where it can be awkward, embarrassing and downright invasive.
The “marital declaration” section from an employment form the Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (IGIMS) – established on November 1983, as an autonomous organisation on the pattern of All India Institute of Medical Sciences – in Sheikhpura, Patna has a list of very odd questions.
#Bihar IGIMS Patna asks employees to declare their virginity and number of wives etc in a marital status declaration form pic.twitter.com/7X3kyulFth
— ANI (@ANI_news) August 2, 2017
Those filling the form have to declare if they are either “bachelors”, “widowers” or “virgins”. That’s right. The questions get more and more weird. One has to declare if he is “married and has only one wife living”, or if he is married and has “more than one wife living”.
From what can be assumed (in this really bizarre form), potential women employees have to declare whether they are married “to a person who has no other wife living”, or if they are married “to a person who has another wife living”.
The form ends with, “I request that in view of the reasons stated below, I may be granted exemptions from the operation of restriction of the recruitment service of person having more than one wife living.”
One can only imagine what that means. But let us look at the questions again.
The first one is as sexist as it gets. A bachelor (the forms misspells it as “bechelor”) is an unmarried male. A widower is a man who has lost his spouse by death and has not married again. And a virgin is a person who has never had sexual intercourse. One, since both bachelor and virgin are options, one can only assume that the first one is meant for men and the latter for women. Of course, it is unsanskari for Indian women to be having premarital sex, so one has to declare one's virginity. No one knows how one is expected to substantiate it.
Two, the form has an option for widowed men but not for widowed women. How typical. Widows in India are ostracised and marginalised. Yes, they are no longer burnt on the funeral pyres of their husbands but things haven’t improved a lot beyond that. While in cosmopolitan settings, more and more Indian widows have stopped conforming to social stigma, there still exist “widow cities” where the young are abused and the old are left to beg. Additionally, in several parts of north India, widows are often remarried to their younger brothers-in-law.
In the other questions, women (although it is not specified at all) are expected to declare if they are the only wives or if their spouse is a polygamist. Polygamy became illegal in India in 1956, uniformly for all of its citizens except Muslims, who are permitted to have four wives owing to personal laws. The law in itself is enormously sexist because it does not recognise polyandry.
Similarly, the men filling the form have to state if they are in a monogamous or a polygamous marriage.
One surely needs to ask IGIMS why they require their employees to provide personal information such as this, and more importantly, why their form is so blatantly sexist.