Women Empowerment and Local Governance: A Case Study of Sanand District of Gujarat

One of the fundamental aspects of modern democratic governance is gender equality wherein both men and women should have equal rights and opportunities to participate fully in all the endeavors and especially at political process, with respect to decision-making capacity. There is a growing momentum among the government and civil society to foster and ensure women's participation, leadership and empowerment in the political arena specifically with local governance structures In recent report of the United Nations Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) 2013, there is a list of 93 countries and they are ranked according to their women empowerment level in the country. Surprisingly, there is no place for India in the list of those 93 countries, which clearly shows that the level of women empowerment in the country is not much remarkable compared to the other countries of the world. Therefore, there is a growing demand for increasing women empowerment and presence of women in political decision making. Thus, women need to be ‘empowered’ in the realm of political decision-making so as to facilitate their ‘holistic’ empowerment. Women empowerment essentially involves building up of a society wherein women can breathe without the fear of oppression, exploitation, apprehension, discrimination and the general feeling of oppression, which goes with being a woman in a traditionally male-dominated structure. In order to ensure ‘holistic’ women empowerment, most of the women empowerment advocates argue that the empowerment of women should be through legislation for ensuring participation and decision-making in political process.

This research attempts to look at the dynamism of the system whereby women empowerment is achieved through women participation in the local governance structures and in addition to that, there is also an attempt to explore the status of women's participation and how their participation in local governance structures leads to women empowerment. The article is based on the primary evidences collected from women Sarpanch¹ in various villages of Sanand district of Gujarat state, India (as per 2012 Panchayat elections) and will attempt to analysis whether the political participation of women actually translate into political concrete women empowerment.

The study largely reveals that increased political participation of women in village Panchayat does have a significant barring on women empowerment for by and large elected women representatives are successful in seeking redressal to women-specific issues. However, looking at the broader view of India, there are serious gaps in the gender balancing both in terms of women reservation policy and reform agenda. Therefore, the question of women participation at this level is crucial and deserves special attention and hence there should be measures to increase the quantity of women representation accompanied by measures to improve the quality of women participation.