The women working in the different PSUs are hoping to achieve something that has not been done in the past 60 years. “We are collecting data on the women in the PSU sector as there is no comprehensive data available on them, even the Government of India does not have a data on them,” said Suguna Swaminathan, a member of the apex body of WIPS and senior official at Bharat Heavy Electrical.

According to the WIPS members, lack of data made it difficult to put a figure to the exact number of women working in the sector or even their composition.

The WIPS has more than 10,000 women as its members, all of who are employed with PSUs. But they say that there are far more women working in the sector.

“There is no data on the workforce of women, even in organised sector and unless we build a date base it will be difficult to anaylse this,” said Swaminathan. She added that around 250 PSUs are a part of the WIPS and they have asked the member organisations to provide the data, and incorporate some of it in their annual report.

“Two years ago, we started to work on this and although some progress has been made, much more needs to be done,” she added.

Although there has been an upward swing in the number of women joining PSUs in the past ten years, the figures are still far from satisfactory. Veena Kumari, secretary, Eastern chapter and senior employee of Indian Oil Corporation said: “Women comprise roughly eight to nine percent of the workforce in the PSUs but we need to know the exact number to see how much progress has been made in the last few decades.”