Kerala on Wednesday set up a three-member panel to look into problems faced by women in the state’s film industry, and to suggest solutions to them.
The committee is led by retired Kerala High Court Justice K Hema. The other two members are veteran actor Sharada and former bureaucrat KB Valsalakumari, IANS reported state Cinema and Culture Minister AK Balan as saying. “Even though no time-frame has been fixed, they will be submitting their report without delay so we can take appropriate action,” he said.
The committee was formed weeks after a women’s collective had met Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to ask that such a panel be formed to look into gender problems in the industry. The collective had presented a memo to Vijayan, in which they said that their industry was not even at a point where “basic human rights or wage related issues can even be discussed”, The News Minute reported. They had asked for wage disparity to be addressed, a fund for women who could not work during their pregnancies, and reservation for women in government-owned studios, among other things.
The Malayalam film industry has unions, but has no separate one for women working in the field.
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