Gender Disparities in Rural Rajasthan: Policy Initiatives for Women Empowerment and Ground Realities

This explains the fact that the measures of outcome indicators set by MDG do not concur with the current targets set as the facts do establish that though spurts of development and assertions of best practices have established that women have started ceasing jobs/economic opportunities and have started participating in the developmental activities, many women across the country are still poor, hungry, mal-nourished, illiterate and diseased and it is heartening to find that even today there are 42% of the households without proper sanitary latrines. And the labour markets are not confident to absorb the women in their fold (only 18–20% between 1999–2004). A skewed rise in the number of SHGs formed and government programmes schemed in favour of women contradicts the ground realities where they are not successful in establishing and organising their enterprises and their income levels remain paltry sums. Now moving with such ground realities it is imperative for Government of India to develop appropriate indicators in their efforts to overcome these problems at the grassroot level lest these offset major fissures in the future, encouraging severe discrimination which reaches a point of no return and beyond scope for salvage as these are the building blocks for promoting gender equality and empowerment of women. Thus promoting gender equality becomes the pioneer building block to achieve empowerment of women.