Column | Sunil Jaglan: ideas for an equal world

Sunil Jaglan advocates for gender equality, empowering both women and men through innovative campaigns and personal transformation.

Sunil Jaglan, 43, is evidence that the birth of a daughter can inspire a man to smash the patriarchy. His childhood home followed that classic Indian rule: housework is the woman’s job.

“My father was a teacher but even on his holidays, he would be reading the newspaper as my mother served him,” he says. “My habits were the same.” Jaglan was waited hand on foot by his three younger sisters. “We all studied but they also had to do housework and my work,” he adds. “Wash my clothes, give me chai or I would say, ‘I want to eat namkeen chawal [savoury rice]’.”

Now, he is a gender advocate with whom women share their most intimate problems. Jaglan is their window to a more equitable world and they discuss everything, from domestic violence and late periods to vaginal health and hormonal imbalance.

It helps that he has great ideas, like his viral 2015 ‘Selfie With Daughter’ campaign that urged proud fathers to take photographs with their daughters to fight female foeticide. He received 8 lakh images from around the world. That’s only one of a 100 or so campaigns around gender equity that Jaglan has conjured up after his first daughter, Nandini, was born in 2012.

When he distributed sweets to celebrate her birth, he got sympathy and condolences. That was his Eureka moment. By then, the mathematics postgraduate was two years into his five-year stint as sarpanch (village leader) of the Bibipur Gram Panchayat in Haryana. That year, he organised a khap mahapanchayat in which women participated. They invited hundreds of khap leaders to support them in a campaign against female foeticide. The State’s sex ratio has climbed to 923 in 2025, from 850 in 2012.

Many of Jaglan’s early ideas focused on foeticide but later they expanded to include issues such as ‘Womaniya GDP’, a campaign to compensate women for household chores or ‘Gaali Bandh Ghar’, an effort to prevent sexist abuses, and ‘Women’s Happiness Chart’ that logged the number of hours in a day that women felt happy. “They are so happy when there is a programme in the village, but they don’t feel that same joy at home,” he says.